


The Rabbit and The Fox

by firstbornking



Category: Killing Stalking
Genre: Abuse, Blood, Corpse Desecration, Drug Use, Frottage, Hallucinations, Horror, Hurt/Comfort, Intercrural Sex, Lima Syndrome, M/M, Manipulation, Mommy Issues, Murder, Possessive Behavior, Stockholm Syndrome, Swearing, Twisted and Fluffy Feelings, Unhealthy Relationships, Verbal Humiliation
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-02-09
Updated: 2017-04-10
Packaged: 2018-09-23 01:00:12
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 4
Words: 22,803
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9632843
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/firstbornking/pseuds/firstbornking
Summary: “He’s gone. He’s gone… He’s gone!Bullshit!After all that crawling around…arghhh!That little fucker… he actually ran away?After everything I said?He ignored me?No. No… there’s no way…he did everything I asked him.”Everything you said…? Everything you asked him…? Yeah, you know we gotta look a little deeper into that, my homicidal compadre.Set between chapters 10 and 13.





	1. he lives down in a ribcage in the dry leaves of a heart

_“Human blood’s really warm, isn’t it?”_

Bum’s perception is a surreal step behind reality. While Sangwoo is slicking blood across his stomach like a preschooler playing with fingerpaint, nuzzling into his shoulder with a tender sigh, rippling against his back with sadistic satisfaction, his mind flashes pomegranate seeds and dried jujubes, watermelon cut into perfect triangles and raspberries simmering with sugar and lemon juice and rice flour.

The blood is warm, but Sangwoo is on fire, and Bum hears his grandmother’s voice drift down from the kitchen, _‘You must keep your wits about you when a fire breaks out, sonja, lest you panic and pour water over grease like a fool. Do you want to burn the whole house down, child? Fetch me that powder, I’ll show you what -’_

Sangwoo brings his hand up to rub the blood into Bum’s face, and Bum pinches his eyes shut with no more than a tight whimper in protest, pressing his head back against the broad shoulder behind him as Sangwoo whispers in his ear, too gentle to be anything but sinister, “How is it?”

He listens through wet cotton and old memories. Beneath Sangwoo’s hand, he remembers his grandfather showing him how lobsters whip and curl when boiled alive, claws scrabbling and scraping the sides of the pot in a struggle as desperate as it was useless, _‘You gotta look out, sonja, the little fuckers will splash you good if you’re not careful! … Oh, and don’t mind that hissing. I know it sounds like they’re screaming, but it’s just -’_

“Your first killing.”

Sangwoo lowers his hand and Bum opens his eyes back up, but all he can see is Jihae’s favorite red nail polish. He remembers the way she would reapply a coat while swinging her legs back and forth over the bleachers during free periods; how she would bend her fingers and blow over the fresh lacquer to set it quick enough to beat the bell; the look on her face when she realized her bottle of Essie in Fifth Avenue was missing from her purse at the end of the day, her voice carrying across the parking lot, _‘I can’t believe I lost it! It’s my go-to color, I swear, I don’t know when I could have -’_

“Hey.”

Bum stutters in a ragged breath, and Sangwoo leans his chin heavily into the concave dip of Bum’s collarbone, eyes drawn to a contemplative half-mast. His mild air is already receding, evaporating into a sharp curiosity that Bum knows will be appeased, one way or another, and he bites his lower lip to keep his teeth from chattering as Sangwoo studies him with familiar detachment.

His skin goes taxidermy tight and his lungs flood with panic. Black spots creep in along the edges of his vision and it’s all he can do to stave off the pressing need to hyperventilate. It’s only when Sangwoo brushes a thumb beneath his right eye that he realizes that he’s crying, too.

“You really are fucking pitiful,” Sangwoo mocks, but it’s tempered by calloused fingers cupping his face and brushing away his tears. His tone is a strange sort of doting ridicule, and Bum shakes beneath the mixed signals.

“You should’ve seen the look on your face when you thought you were gonna get stuck, Bum,” he goes on, gloved hands lowering to tease over the bandages around his throat. Bum tips his chin up, more than fine with looking at the ceiling instead of the body assuming room temperature in front of them. “Squirming and squealing like there was no tomorrow. ‘I hate knives! I’m scared, I’m scared! Sangwoo! No, no, _Sangwoo_!’ Ahh... _priceless_.”

Going by the breathless edge in his voice, Sangwoo doesn't just mean he found him begging for his life funny, and Bum can’t keep his teeth from clacking together, now. A shiver wracks his whole body, a chill settling deep in his core, icicles blooming up from his intestines to pierce through the floor of his heart.

Sangwoo rolls his eyes. He pinches Bum’s jaw back between his thumb and forefinger, pressing in tight enough to force Bum’s teeth apart, and Bum winces as his molars slice into the insides of his cheeks.

When his own blood mixes with his saliva, the metallic odor permeating the basement slams into him full force. Nausea knocks his stomach upside down and rips a gasp from his throat. He knows if he swallows he will retch. He knows if he can’t calm down he will pass out. He knows Sangwoo will dislike both of those reactions.

“Jesus, you could stand to cheer up a little... Pretty rude to the dead guy, don’t you think? I’m sure he would’ve been happy in your place.”

His humorless warning hangs heavy in the air and Bum heeds it as best he can. He stares up at the fluorescent tubes hanging from the ceiling until his vision burns with mercury halos, lets his useless fight or flight response seep down into the cold concrete beneath him. He chances a shaky dip of his chin against Sangwoo’s hand, but his captor’s grip remains stern, his expression sober, and Bum knows anything he could say now would be too little, too late.

Sangwoo is thinking. That’s always a bad thing.

The minute masquerades as an hour, and by the time Sangwoo sighs out in annoyance, lets go of his aching jaw and stands up, it takes everything Bum has to remain upright without the man’s support. Sangwoo pads over to the worktable to clatter through a toolbox - for what, Bum dare not crane his neck to see, but he does take this chance to spit up his mouthful of blood and saliva into the pool of gore creeping up on his knees. He has no time for relief before Sangwoo finds what he’s looking for and returns to kneel at his back.

“Forget your first kill... this is your first time even hurting anyone, huh?”

Sangwoo’s tone requires no response. He grabs Bum’s right arm and _schicks_ through the green masking tape around his biceps with a pair of scissors, does the same with his bound hands, ripping the tape off before catching Bum’s left wrist to prod at the scars lining it in amendment.

“Well, besides yourself, obviously.”

Sangwoo’s voice is sharp with disdain, and Bum still has ken enough to go red at his resounding disapproval. He hangs his head low as Sangwoo drops his hand with a fed up scoff, brings his arms around his chest to rub the blood back into them and keep his tremors at bay.

“Goddamnit, scared of knives… what bullshit,” Sangwoo peels his gloves off, tossing them over his shoulder with a wet _splat_ before running a hand back through his own hair in exasperation. “You’re a real piece of work, wailing on about hating knives when you’ve slit your wrists open so many times I bet you’ve lost count… You don’t make any fucking sense, you know that?”

Bum shrinks in on himself and offers up no denials, and Sangwoo shifts forward to blow hot air through clenched teeth against the back of his neck. He drags a slow, heavy hand over the juts and dips of his vertebrae, drawing in close to bear down over his cowering back, and Bum holds still as the gears turn in his tormentor’s head. There’s a change in the atmosphere when he comes to a conclusion, and Bum tightens up in nervous anticipation.

Sangwoo reaches an arm around him, drops the just-used scissors into his lap, and simply says, “Get me my knife back.”

Bum stares down at the scissors in his hands like he’s never seen a pair before in his life, his mind blank as calcite because he _doesn’t want to understand_ \- but only for a moment before Sangwoo wrenches his head back by a fistful of hair, whispers darkly against the shell of his ear, “Don’t make me get it outta him for you, Bum. I promise you won’t like it if I do.”

With that, he lets go with a light shove, and Bum catches himself on a weak hand to look at the body in front of them with fresh, welling horror.

Now removed from the blinding panic of death, with his arms free and feet on the ground, he is painfully _present_. He knows he has no more choice in extracting the knife now than he did in having his body used to plunge it into the man in the first place, but as he shifts his broken legs under himself to crawl up to the cooling corpse, guilt roils fiercely in his stomach.

_‘I’m so sorry.’_

He hacks at the tape holding the man’s hands in place, the scissors canting sideways twice before finally sliding clean past the wrists. The left hand falls to the ground, the right catches over the blade’s handle, and he shakily sets the scissors down beside himself.

_‘I’m so, so sorry.’_

He tugs the knife out from under the right hand, centimeter by bloody centimeter. He has to brace a palm on the man’s flank to keep him from keeling over onto his front. When he finally removes the tip, and the man’s right hand flops down to lifelessly join his left, and more blood than he thought a body could hold starts pouring out of the stab wound in earnest, Bum knows his apologies count for nothing.

He keeps saying them anyway.

“Good job, Bum, that’s good. That wasn’t so hard, was it?” Sangwoo is praising him, backhanded and sweet as cane syrup, and it only makes his stomach knot up tighter. He screws his eyes shut, shudders at the sensation of saltwater sliding through the drying blood on his face; the knife is heavy and wet with that same blood and he can’t bear to have it in his hand anymore.

He shifts around on clumsy, bruised knees and blindly holds the blade out to Sangwoo, laid out flat against both of his open palms. Head ducked down between his elbows, pink tears falling to the concrete, back trembling uncontrollably - he is a bloody shrinking violet with no clue what a perfect picture he makes for the morbid-minded.

Sangwoo’s mouth closes with an audible click, and he breathes out a quiet, “ _Fuck_.”

_‘... What?’_

Bum hazards a peek up at him, and his nerves hit the ceiling when he can’t read his expression. He starts to lower the blade to the ground in his uncertainty, but Sangwoo steps forward to snatch it from him before he can. He flinches back and Sangwoo sneers down at him, but there’s a forced feeling to it, a certain beguilement in his eyes, that burkes Bum’s anxiety. He tilts his head in confusion, looks up at the younger man timidly.

“Sangwoo…?”

Sangwoo ignores him. He taps the blunt side of the knife to his own temple in dark consideration. His eyes flicker from Bum’s kneeling form to the unfortunate man behind him and back again, before finally settling on Bum’s upturned wrists with a sphinxlike smile that does not bode well for his captive’s fragile mental health.

“What’d you use to do it?” he asks, crouching down to Bum’s level and touching the tip of the knife to Bum’s left wrist. He grins when Bum goes still as the corpse behind himself and three times as pale.

“Huh, Bum? What’d you use…” he turns the blade to lightly drag the keen edge across Bum’s wrist in a cruel pantomime, “... to slice your little wrists open?”

Bum doesn’t attempt to pull his arm away, frozen by futility and fear and reticence. He doesn’t want to talk about this. He doesn’t want Sangwoo to know anything more than he already does about his relationship with self-harm. He hears the man’s reaction to his initial confession in an endless echo, _‘You know what? I hate guys like you the most. I hate guys like you the most. I hate guys like you -’_

“Was it… a razor, or scissors?” Sangwoo grabs Bum’s wrist with his free hand, flips the knife parallel to Bum’s forearm, leans closer to inspect the scars under the glossy fluorescent lights.

“Hmm, no. Too jagged for those. Maybe a shard of glass… the metal frame of a window screen…?” He presses his cheek to Bum’s wrist, kisses the scars tenderly, and the memory of the last time he had done the same makes Bum’s reservations impossible to hold onto.

“C’mon, Bum. Don’t keep me guessing. Tell me.”

Bum looks down at Sangwoo’s knees as he forces himself to whisper out, “... a pocket knife.”

Sangwoo hums in approval, nudging Bum’s hand open to fit his cheek against his palm. “Serrated edge?”

“Yes.”

Sangwoo sets down the knife and Bum’s hand, walks over to his worktable to pick up the red toolbox underneath it. He drops it on the table with a loud _clang_ that makes Bum jump, digging through it until he finds what he’s looking for with a happy, “Bingo.”

He bounds back across the room, brandishing a black and green Benchmade pocket knife, and Bum’s heart sinks into his bandaged feet.

“Like this, Bum?” he asks, flicking the blade open to run his thumb over its sharp, uneven teeth. Bum can only manage a nod in response, and Sangwoo beams at him with his eyes closed, bright and beautiful and horrifying to behold. Bum attempts to brace himself for whatever may come next, but -

“ _Then show me_.”

\- he can’t.

He cowers back, instinctively glances down at his wrists. Phantom pain sets them ablaze and for the first time in well over a decade, he doesn’t want to hurt himself. Sangwoo hurts him plenty, and he couldn’t bear to heap more pain on top of that by his own hand.

“Oh, no, you’ve got me wrong. Not on you! Never on you, I never want you hurting yourself again…” Sangwoo shifts forward, grabs him about the knees and turns him back around to look at the dead man once again, “... on him, Bum. Show me how you did it on him.”

Bum blanches whiter than snow, looks over his shoulder in wide-eyed alarm. “S-Sangwoo, that’s - I - I -”

“What? You can’t?” Sangwoo coos, kneeling down with a leg on either side of his captive. He’s radiating warmth, but Bum can’t feel it past his own blockade of freezing skin.

“Well, I’ll give you a choice,” he goes on reasonably, as if they’re deciding where to vacation for the summer or what to have for dinner tomorrow. He picks up the butcher knife from the floor with his free hand, presses its blunt edge into Bum’s chin to lift his head, chuckles when it makes him gulp and shiver and sob.

“Either you cut him up… or I cut _you_ up. Okay?”

Bum can’t nod and he can’t speak, so he settles for touching Sangwoo’s forearm in acknowledgement. It’s enough for Sangwoo, who nuzzles against his neck, trickles a sigh down his spine, lowers the butcher knife so Bum can suck in a reedy breath. He dangles the pocket knife in front of Bum’s face between a thumb and forefinger and Bum leans back into his chest, never minding the fact that his captor is scarier than a four inch blade, especially one that he wants him to use on someone else.

“Which one will it be?” he asks, as if the answer isn’t already a foregone conclusion. Bum holds up a shaky hand and Sangwoo sets the pocket knife in his palm, preening in pride and joy. “Atta boy, Bum, that’s the right choice. This’ll be good for you, you’ll see, I promise… Now, get to it. He won’t get up and do it for you.”

He pushes Bum forward with hulking hands and Bum can’t catch himself this time, collapsing sideways and barely able to keep himself from cracking his skull against the concrete by throwing out an arm at the last split second. Sangwoo tuts in exasperation, reminiscent of a mother disappointed with her child for leaving greens on his dinner plate.

“I guess you need my help with everything, huh?”

His tone is at once curt and fond, and Bum tries to sit himself back up to escape both his ire and affection, but Sangwoo clicks his tongue again, picks him up by the knees and shoulders as if he weighs no more than a cloud.

“No, no, here, let me. I don’t mind helping _you_ …” he looks over at the poor dead man with a sneer and Bum has to bury his face in his chest, wrapping his arms around his neck like tendrils of smoke wisping from an overpowering flame. The open pocket knife is still clutched in his hand at the back of Sangwoo’s neck, but using it on him is the furthest thing from his mind.

Sangwoo lowers him down into the tarn of blood, and Bum grimaces when it soaks through his underwear, clings thick and cool to the backs of his thighs. He eases Bum’s arms from around his neck before standing to kick the man onto his back; the body is grotesquely limp and Bum muses distantly that rigor mortis must not set in for at least a couple hours after death. Sangwoo yanks the man’s right arm out so it lays next to Bum’s knee and looks over at Bum with an encouraging smile.

“You ready?”

Bum isn’t, but that hardly matters. He nods, pulls the chilled hand into his lap, wills his own to stop shaking. If he was sorry removing the murder weapon, now he is positively penitent knowing he must mutilate the man’s body. He knows that this act is going to damage him in a way that won’t heal like his wrists or legs or throat.

_Desecration._

He tells himself that he’s not hurting him, that he’s already dead and he won’t feel any pain, but it does little to help. Bum knows in his soul that the human body is sacred, that this is defilement in the first degree and he feels _so sick_ , but Sangwoo is staring at him with dark expectation and he has no choice. He turns the hand palm up, lines the blade up across the wrist and applies the same pressure and torque that he always used on himself. The flesh parts easily, and Bum is grimly surprised when even more blood starts to sluggishly seep out.

“Again,” Sangwoo says, like a teacher drilling equations into a pupil, and Bum obeys with a shudder, slicing down at a slightly different angle to make a narrow X. The man’s blood drips onto his lower belly, down the fronts of his upper thighs, joins the rest of the thickening blood on the concrete.

“Again, deeper.”

This time Bum hacks straight through tendons and halfway through the muscle in his haste to obey. The _pop-snap-squelch_ and the way the hand falls back in mangled flaccidity makes him flinch back hard, desperately try to push the limb out of his lap, but Sangwoo is behind him holding it in place before he can, shushing him and steadying his hands.

“Calm down, you’re doing fine. Much better than I thought you would.”

“Sangwoo, this is - this is too deep. I never went… _this_ deep. I thought you -”

“Well, of course you didn’t go this deep. His wrists are nearly three times thicker than yours.” Sangwoo rests his chin on his bony shoulder again, picks up Bum’s left wrist and the man’s mutilated right one, holds them side by side in eager comparison.

“Look at that, see? So _tiny_! If you went this deep on yours, you’d have taken your hand clean off… Your scars look like paper cuts next to what you just did to him, Bum. Good job.”

Bum doesn’t understand how someone can be condescending and endearing at the same time, but Sangwoo pulls it off it with ease. He slumps under the strange praise, deciding to accept Sangwoo’s pleased tone at face value with a soft, “Okay… okay, Sangwoo. Should I -” he makes a cutting motion with the knife in his right hand, “- again?”

Sangwoo lights up like the International Fireworks Festival, the one his grandparents took him to for his eighth birthday, and Bum is almost happy he went ahead and offered.

When Sangwoo flings the man’s hand away and pulls him into a starving kiss, greedy and gruesome and grueling, Bum thinks that he _is_ happy.

... At least, this is closer to happiness than he’s ever been before.

But then Sangwoo lays him down in the blood and ignores him when he squeaks and squirms in protest. The weak objection only serves to ratchet up his enthusiasm, a groan rumbling from his chest as he hikes his tool apron to the side and wedges his hips between Bum's delicate legs, rutting in close and brutal and sweltering. 

 _'He's so hard,'_ Bum realizes with a sick thrill.  _'He's so, so hard.'_

Sangwoo dips his hands in the gore and styles it through Bum's hair like pomade, grabs his hips in a stranglehold and rocks against him over and over and over, kisses him like he's the ocean and all he wants to do is drown inside of him.

Bum kisses him back with no input from his mind, twining his arms back around his neck and opening his legs for him like the country whore Sangwoo likes to dress him as... but the pocket knife is still clutched in his right hand, once again at the nape of Sangwoo's neck, and this time the possibility weighs heavy in his mind. Sangwoo's eyes are closed, he's as distracted as he's ever going to be, Bum might not get another chance like this.  

_'What if I... I could just...'_

He raises the blade up as high as he can, points it down at Sangwoo's atlas vertebra. _'I just have to slip it in between... right through the spinal cord and he'll... it doesn't matter how strong he is, he'll...'_

"Fuck, fuck, Bum, _Bum_ -"

Bum drops the knife next to them with a metal _clink_. Sangwoo glances over at the noise, sees the bloodstained pocket knife and looks back down at Bum's blushing face with a smirk. He doesn't pause in his rutting for a second, grinds down and forward until Bum chokes out a soft moan, grins wide and feral before he leans down to whisper in Bum's ear, as if he doesn't want the dead man eavesdropping -

" _You're too good to be true, Bum_."

He slides his arms under Bum's shoulders to cradle the back of his skull in both hands, goes back to kissing him with double the intensity, makes sure each thrust slides their clothed cocks together, and Bum -

Bum doesn't know what to think anymore.    

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sangwoo was saved by hollerin' out _Bum's_ name, _yaaaa boi_ ~
> 
> Oh ho ho, I am fucking _smitten_ with these two, _good god_. Pretty much all of part two is written already, but please, let me know what ya'll thought of this. It's my first piece of hopefully many for this fandom and I am thirsty af for some quality discourse about anything and everything KS.
> 
> You can find me over on Tumblr @thefirstbornking if you wanna hit me up about KS or my stories, maybe give me prompts or ideas? If anything strikes my fancy, I might give it a shot!
> 
> Peace out!
> 
> ~ firstbornking


	2. i chain him up with ribbons and call it a work of art

There is adhesive stuck to his wrists from the green masking tape with which Sangwoo had bound them. He’s already gotten it off his upper arms, but scrubbing at his bird-bone wrists with the washrag has done nothing but inflame his skin, so he is now delicately picking and scraping at the sticky substance with his uneven nails. He takes his time soaking in the clear, warm water of the tub, not knowing when he’ll next get the opportunity to do so.

He is finally upstairs again.

Sangwoo went back down to the basement after helping him up to the bathroom and rinsing the blood off of him with the showerhead. Bum tries to avoid thinking about why, and he fails.

_‘You don’t have time to worry about him... These are desperate times, after all.’_

Bum can’t afford to think of anything but Sangwoo’s mood, but he still spends energy he doesn’t have wondering how old that man’s daughter was, where he had proposed to his wife, if a little girl and her mother were both laying awake in their beds wondering why he was out so late.

Tears prick the corners of his eyes, but he doesn’t stop peeling away the adhesive clinging to his skin. He hears the over-pressurized _whoosh-hiss_ of the spigot opening downstairs, Sangwoo’s footsteps, a loud thud and a muffled curse. He dips his hands back under the bathwater and soaks in the warmth, lets it seep into his pores, down into the marrow of his bones, and the stinging in his eyes dies down.

_‘It’s good, right? You should be grateful. The only reason you can even -’_

He rubs the palms of his hands over his wrists until they are finally free of the tape’s residue, and he takes a bitter comfort in being clean, even as Sangwoo’s grunts and occasional peal of laughter echo up the stairs and down the hall. In a macabre contradiction, he feels more alive than he has in weeks listening to Sangwoo hew the unlucky man’s body into manageable pieces in the basement. He accepts the mortal rush with stoicism, too drained to entertain guilt or disgust or panic over the state of his moral backbone.

He’s not a murderer, not like Sangwoo is. He tells himself that. He knows he needs to tell himself that, over and over and over again, but as he thinks of the dead man’s wife and daughter, and finds he can muster nothing more than exhausted pity that slips through his fingers like the water he’s sitting in, he feels like a killer.

There is an important difference between a murderer and a killer, he knows, and even then he’s still not - he still hadn’t really - _it wasn’t_ -

White dots appear and begin a steady pulse along the periphery of his vision, he can taste copper and he can smell ozone and there is a blindfolded man standing in the open doorway to the bathroom. He is determined on his severed hand, slowly attempting to reattach it to its rightful place on his wrist, and when it doesn’t work he tilts his head in slack-jawed confusion.

“Forgive me, dear,” he says, and Bum is only just able to stifle his shriek, throwing himself against the far side of the tub and splashing water clear across the floor. “Forgive me, dear. Forgive me, dear. Forgive me -” Bum puts his hands over his ears, ducks his head against his trembling knees. It’s not real. The voice is not real, the figure is not real. He’s not - _it’s not_.

“I’m begging you! I’m begging you! _I’m begging you! I’m begging_ -”

He starts humming. He can only think of one song. He hums through the melody as quickly as possible so he can repeat it, and then he repeats it again, and then again. By the fifth iteration, his heartbeat has started to slow back down. By the sixth, he is sure the illusion has passed.

Quieting down, he reaches forward to pull the stopper from the drain without looking up from his knees. Sangwoo had only told him to get clean, so he doesn’t know what he’s supposed to do now, but he knows he can’t leave the linoleum wet like it is. He dries himself off quickly before throwing the towel across the floor, and it’s as he’s beginning to awkwardly maneuver himself up and out of the tub that Sangwoo appears in the doorway.

He freezes, unsure of his eyes even though the white snow is gone, but only for a half-second because Sangwoo is striding forward to kneel in front of the tub, slipping his arms under his knees and upper back to hoist him up against his chest. He is shirtless and sweat damp but clean, pouring off heat and breathing heavier than usual. He is smiling and he is real.

“You done, Bum?”

Bum nods at the soaked bandages dangling from his legs, red-faced at his own nakedness, but Sangwoo pays it no mind so he doesn’t, either. His captor carries him out to the bedroom and softly sets him down on the futon; the electric blanket underneath it has been turned on and it’s even warmer than the bathwater had been. The familiar juniper green skirt and one of Sangwoo’s Henley shirts, the black one with red stripes, has been set out next to the bed. Bum blinks.

“You’re not -” he cuts himself off, thinking better of saying anything at all, but Sangwoo tilts his head at him.

“I’m not…?” Sangwoo prompts, seeking eye contact even as his hands are carefully straightening out Bum’s crooked legs to start unwinding the wet bandages on them. Bum shivers, can only manage to look at Sangwoo’s mouth for a moment before his eyes flicker to the closet door that leads to the basement. Sangwoo’s easy smile lowers and Bum swallows down rising bile.

“... going to... put me back… down there?”

“Hmm...” Sangwoo finishes unraveling the gauze on his left leg, reaches over to do the same with his right as he considers the question, calm and meditative.

“Well, it’s sort of a mess down there right now… and I was planning to redo your bandages and have you sleep up here with me tonight, but if you wanna go back down there, I can -”

“No!”

Bum’s hands move faster than his mind, grasping Sangwoo’s biceps in wide-eyed desperation. Sangwoo pauses in removing the bandaging on his right foot, meets his frantic eyes with an amused smirk.

“ _No_ , you don’t wanna sleep up here with me… ? Be clear now, Bum,” he reaches a hand up to cradle the back of his captive’s head, and Bum’s fingers twitch against his arms, “... or I might misunderstand you.”

Bum pales, veins crisscrossing bright blue under his milk-white skin, and he whispers in a voice made of see through glass, “No, I don’t want to go back down to the basement, Sangwoo.”

Sangwoo arches a brow, patient and forbearing, and Bum takes it as a cue to continue. He drops his hands to his lap and ducks his head, looks up through his eyelashes and prays with the clarity commanded of him, “I want to… sleep up here with you. Please, Sangwoo. Please let me stay up here with you.”

Sangwoo paws through his hair, pats the top of his head, breaks into a grin when Bum presses back into his touch. He is as handsome as he is terrifying, and Bum is the only person alive who knows that.

“Good boy,” Sangwoo praises, indulgent and pleased, and Bum allows some of his tension to bleed into the futon. Sangwoo goes back to undoing his bandages, making quick work of his right foot and moving up to his collarbone and neck, and Bum focuses on sitting limp and doll-like under his hands.

What a joke, to have a man so many years his junior call him boy. Bum is old enough to remember Kim Young-sam becoming the seventh president of their country; to have witnessed the outraged protests in the wake of the Sampoong Department Store collapse in Seoul; to have understood how the greed of the chaebol led to the IMF bailout crisis as the debacle unfolded on the news. He has lived through years of events Sangwoo has only a vague knowledge of, yet the younger man insists on calling him boy and treating him like a child.

Like a pet.

He tips his chin up to allow Sangwoo to remove the last of the tape covering his slit throat, and it doesn’t matter. Irritation and indignation were already unfamiliar feelings in his previous life. Now they are forbidden ones.

Sangwoo has him completely undressed and unbandaged for the first time in some time. He doesn’t know how long, but it seems long enough to warrant Sangwoo’s renewed interest in his naked body. Sangwoo lightly drags his thumb along the deep wound lining Bum’s neck; it has smoothly passed the inflammation phase and is now in the process of rebuilding tissue, the edges a furrowed, deep pink leading into a near black center fissure. Sangwoo admires it as one would a Rembrandt or a Monet, humming deep in the back of his throat, and his appreciation is so obscene Bum blushes to the roots of his hair.

“It’s gonna be such a pretty scar… it’ll be even whiter than your skin… and when you heal...” he trails off, caught in some distant daydream, and disturbing as it is, Bum simply latches onto the fact that the dead never scar. Sangwoo caresses the injury in silence for another minute or ten, Bum can’t tell, before he finally comes back to the present. He fits Bum’s cheek in the palm of his hand, catches Bum’s eyes with another smile.

“I’ve been taking good care of it, haven’t I? I told you I wouldn’t let it get infected. You’ve barely even spiked a fever, right?”

Bum nods against the large hand, quick to put on a pleasant face. “Yes, Sangwoo. You’ve tended to it very well, thank you.”

It wasn’t a lie. Sangwoo has taken better care of his slit throat than he has any other injury he’s inflicted. He’s flushed it with mild saltwater day after day, applied firm pressure with clean cloths to control the bleeding, kept it moist with antibacterial ointment and covered with sterile gauze and has succeeded in keeping it free of infection, unlike the cut over Bum’s collarbone from early on in his captivity.

Sangwoo’s smile brightens, and Bum is now sure he is with the kind twin, the one he hasn’t seen since before his escape attempt. He lets himself relax against the dry warmth of the futon, smile edging towards sincere, and he barely flinches when Sangwoo stands to open the closet and fetch the Johnson & Johnson military issue first aid kit sitting next to the basement’s trap door. It’s metal, painted navy blue with a white cross and two toggle catches and Bum has never seen it used on anyone but himself.

“Alright, let’s get you dressed so we can get some rest. It’s been a long night, hasn’t it?”

With ease gained through repetition, Sangwoo bandages and tapes up his feet, calves, right collarbone and neck in record time. Slipping on the skirt and oversized Henley takes less than a minute, and just like that, Sangwoo is laying him down on the pillows, flipping off the light and flopping down next to him without putting the medical supplies back in the closet. He pulls the blanket up around their shoulders, adjusts him to a comfortable position in his arms and spoons him tight against his bare chest.

“I’ve missed this,” he says, placing a tender kiss on the nape of Bum’s neck, and Bum hysterically wonders if it’s possible to die of emotional whiplash. His heart contorts with a hellish mixture of conditioned anxiety and banked confusion, but those emotions pale in the shadow of his stupid, overwhelming hope.

He doesn’t trust his voice, so he touches the tips of his fingers to Sangwoo’s forearm and hums in acknowledgement. Sangwoo holds him even tighter, buries his face between Bum’s shoulder and the pillows, and sighs out in contentment.

“I like sleeping next to you. I missed it a lot…”

He sounds shy, voice muffled and achingly genuine. It’s moments like these that Bum realizes just how young his captor is, and he swallows down another wave of nausea.

“... I missed _you_.”

The words wrap tightly around his neck. They slip under his clean bandages and remind him of the noose Sangwoo hung him by in punishment for opening the front door. They force his mouth open to let out a quiet, needy, “O-oh?”

“Hmm, yeah. I sleep much better when you’re with me. She never bangs on the door when you’re here.”

“... Your mom, you mean?” Bum asks tentatively. He remembers Sangwoo confessing that he still hears his dead mother call out to him sometimes, that it scares him so much it makes it impossible to sleep. He also remembers Sangwoo kissing him, both his scarred wrist and his acrid mouth, and he lights up pink in the dark. Pushing Sangwoo to talk about his mother is a gamble, but he knows it’s paid off in his favor when big hands come to cover his own.

“Yeah. It’s like… she’s happy I’m with you. She knows you’re good for me, so she doesn’t have to worry about me being alone anymore.”

Bum interlaces his fingers with Sangwoo’s even as his stomach lurches against his ribs and red light creeps along the corners of the black room. His mind flips through a dozen responses and a hundred reactions in the span of a minute, but then Sangwoo is curling his hands tighter over his own, turning to press his lips against the curve of his shoulder blade.

“I think she wants us to stay together, Bum.”

He whispers it warmly, a secret for the two of them, and a veil ghosts over Bum’s eyes. It pitches everything a shade darker, stuffs up his head with dandelion seeds, strips him of the ability to tell where his feelings end and Sangwoo’s begin.

“That makes me glad, Sangwoo,” he hears himself say. He’s a passenger in his own body, self-determination as foreign as the other side of the world and twice as far away. He can’t tell if what he’s saying is the truth, but it makes Sangwoo grin boyishly against his back, a pleasant rumble bursting from his chest, and the truth is irrelevant.

“Does it?”

“Yes, Sangwoo. I am blessed to have your mother’s approval. It’s so fortunate that she wants me to be with you… I never thought I could be so lucky.”

Sangwoo’s breath hitches, his arms going rigid as cold rolled steel, and Bum doesn’t question for a second that he’s given the correct answer. It’s an intangible shift in the air, a nebulous feeling of _rightness_ that needs no explanation. He knows Sangwoo is happy with his response, and right now, Sangwoo’s happiness is no different from his own.

Sangwoo rolls him onto his back, pins him down by the shoulders and looms large above him, but Bum isn’t scared now. Sangwoo isn’t mad. This is as far as he ever gets from mad, fresh off a kill and speaking softly of his beloved mother. Bum touches his hands to his captor’s elbows, breathes in time with him, quiet and docile and radiating deference.

“Fuck, Bum,” Sangwoo finally whispers, halfway to wonderstruck. “You say the _prettiest things_ sometimes.”

Bum doesn’t have to think of a response, because then Sangwoo is kissing him. It’s single-minded and slow and no less stifling than being drowned in a shallow wash basin, but it is infinitely more pleasurable. He keens in the back of his throat, pushes back sweetly, wastes no time in wrapping his arms around the back of Sangwoo’s neck and threading his fingers through his shorn hair. He is desperately responsive in the way he knows Sangwoo likes, and if the way Sangwoo groans and sighs and cups his face is anything to go by, like it he does.

The past does not exist when they kiss. Beatings and broken bones and dead bodies melt away into nothingness under his lips and teeth and tongue, and Bum is left unable to explain to himself why he shouldn’t enjoy the affection as much as he does. All he knows is that he feels so empty _all the time_ , and Sangwoo fills him fit to bursting whenever he touches him like he never wants to let him go.

Sangwoo breaks the kiss to pry his lame legs open and slot his hips in between, hiking the Henley up to nibble and suck at his collarbone and upper chest. Bum whimpers, drawing his knees up to brace his feet against the futon and running his hands up and down the smooth expanse of Sangwoo’s back.

“Ahh, _ah_ , S-Sangwoo, that’s, _uhn_ , that’s -”

“Hmm?” Sangwoo hums in question around his left nipple, and Bum bucks so hard the younger man has to hold him down with a hand on his sternum in order to keep teasing his chest. He chuckles as he continues, one part mean and nine parts fascinated, and Bum judders under the baritone vibration and added weight.

“You’re so much more sensitive than any girl I’ve ever fooled around with. You sure you’re not playing it up?”

Bum flushes scarlet, embarrassed at his body’s complete lack of subtlety, but still hastens to allay Sangwoo’s suspicions. “I’m - _hah, haa_ \- I’m not, Sangwoo, I promise. It’s just - _hnn, ha_ …”

Sangwoo brings his other hand up to pinch at the nipple not in his mouth and Bum _caterwauls_. He rushes to put a hand over his mouth to dampen the high-pitched wail, but as soon as he tries Sangwoo grabs his wrist and pins it down at his side. Regardless of the dark, Bum knows Sangwoo is staring up at him with a self-satisfied smirk.

“ _It’s just_... what, Bum?”

That level of smugness shouldn’t be possible for one human to house, but of course Sangwoo manages it. It also shouldn’t have Bum hard under his skirt, but of course it does. He sinks back into the pillow, absently fingers the hem of the shirt bunched up under his chin and mumbles out meekly, “... because it’s you, Sangwoo. I can’t help it.”

Sangwoo’s hand flexes hard enough on his wrist to make him gasp, but only for a second before creeping up to lace their fingers together. He lowers his forehead to rest in the center of Bum’s chest, and Bum hesitantly sets his hand on top of his head to card through his hair. Sangwoo breathes out slow, sensual and appreciative, and Bum’s blush deepens to brick red all the way past his collarbones.

“Is that so…?” Sangwoo asks, cutting a line between playful and suspicious. Bum can’t tell if he’s questioning his answer or not, but he goes back to kissing at his nipples and keeps their hands intertwined, relishes the sweat building up between them and their bodies, and the part of Bum that is terrified of this man is absent without leave.

Sangwoo goes slower, takes his time laving his tongue over his captive’s upper chest, sucking blue and purple hickeys into his flesh just to go over them again with twice the vigor. He can feel Sangwoo smirk whenever he lets out a particularly breathless whine, but all he can hear is -

_“Did I do something wrong? I have a wife and daughter waiting for me at -”_

His legs stiffen on either side of Sangwoo’s hips, hand stilling in his hair, heart rate skipping from aroused to off-kilter in a half-second. Sangwoo tenses up along with him, the line of his body going as taut as if he were doing push ups in basic training, his hand tightening fit to crush the one under it. Bum can feel his frown now, too.

“Bum… _Bum_ ,” Sangwoo calls his name, insistent and more patient than he has any right to be, and Bum lays back down in his own body, his heartbeat slowing back down to mirror Sangwoo’s. He resumes petting Sangwoo’s hair with a yielding hum, and Sangwoo presses back into his hand like a cat, loosens his punishing grip on Bum’s fingers.

“What is it, huh? … You can tell me what’s wrong now, Bum.”

Bum isn’t stupid. He hears the command for what it is, and he knows there’s the chance he could piss Sangwoo off with his response now, but he still can’t find it in himself to be afraid. It’s not that he can’t process the threat; it’s that he’s numb to it. It’s like taking his lithium and diazepam as prescribed, like having packaging foam cinched around his heart and crammed inside his head. He isn’t stupid, no… but he’s not exactly sane, either.

“I, ah - I keep… I keep hearing him, Sangwoo.”

“Who, Bum?” Sangwoo strokes his thumb over Bum’s wrist, and Bum bites his lip to ground himself.

“The - the man,” Bum pauses, remembers the earlier demand for complete clarity and swallows hard before whispering, “The one we killed.”

A tremor runs through Sangwoo and Bum continues stroking his hair, goes on quietly, “I’ve heard him beg for his life, and just now I h-heard him mention his wife and daughter. It just - it just startled me, Sangwoo. I’m sorry.”

Sangwoo considers him silently. Bum would normally worry at his lack of immediate response, but he pulls their locked hands up to his mouth to kiss at Bum’s knuckles and Bum stays sedate under him.

“Have you only been hearing him?”

“Well, uhh…” Bum slumps beneath the lie he can’t tell, feels the first tendrils of shame latch around his lungs to shorten his breath. “No, Sangwoo. I saw him in the bathroom earlier, just - just for a minute.”

“Hmm… that sounds scary, Bum. Why didn’t you say anything then?”

“I just…” Bum shrugs, voice sturdy as lace. “It passed and - and I didn’t want to bother you, Sangwoo.”

“You’re too considerate for your own good sometimes, Bum,” Sangwoo sighs and leans up, brings their faces closer together. “Tell me about this next time it happens, okay? This is something I need to know.”

“Yes, Sangwoo.”

It’s not that Sangwoo’s concern hurts as much as his fists; it’s that the damage done by a punch can be measured by a bruise and Bum can watch it heal from his skin given enough time. The damage inflicted by his concern is far more mysterious. It causes insidious aches deep beneath Bum’s skin, makes bad memories slippery and mirage-like and impossible to scrutinize, winds invisible chains around his ankles that are no less binding than nickel or steel and twice as treacherous. He could be convinced these chains are comfortable, that he wants them on, and willingly worn chains are unbreakable.

“You’re probably just tired, Bum. I know this is a lot. I don’t expect you to handle it all by yourself, alright?”

“Alright,” Bum parrots back, but it’s not enough for Sangwoo, who leans up to hang high over him in the dark, lets go of his hand to brace himself on either side of his head. The air twists over on itself in urgency sharp enough to catch in Bum’s throat, to cut his esophagus open from the inside, and Bum holds his breath, white-knuckles the Henley around his neck as Sangwoo speaks.

“We did it together, didn’t we? Just the two of us?”

The question is made of lead, dense and dull grey and poisonous, crossing the blood-brain barrier and casting everything in doubtful shadows. He supposes that Sangwoo isn’t _wrong_ , and he doesn’t spot that thought for the snare it is. He sticks his head straight through the wire noose and pulls the carved trigger with a subdued, “Y-yes, Sangwoo…”

Sangwoo waits, oppressive and unappeased, until Bum again clarifies, closing the wire around his neck, “... we did it… together. The two of us.”

“That’s right, Bum. We did it _together_ , so there’s no need to deal with it alone anymore, understand?”

Sangwoo is distressingly earnest, ardent and wholehearted in a way Bum has never heard from him before. It’s too easy to compare this to conversations normal couples have with one another, to second guess himself and wonder if it’s okay to speak like this with Sangwoo, to cleave to a _maybe_. Maybe he’s not so bad, maybe he could love him back, maybe they could be _good for each other_ -

Sangwoo shakes him one good time about the shoulders, impatiently snaps out, _“Do you get it?”_

“Ah- _ah!_ Yes, Sangwoo, I do!” he reaches up with shaky hands to frame Sangwoo’s face, complements Sangwoo’s tone note for note in a solemn whisper, “I get it, I understand, I do.”

Sangwoo covers Bum’s right hand with his left, lowers down onto his forearm to mingle their breaths together, demands flatly, “Tell me what you get.”

Bum shies down into the comforter, but smoothes his thumbs across Sangwoo’s cheekbones and under his dark circles as he says, “I get that… you made sure I picked the right cards, and I…” he loses his voice, but Sangwoo presses his cheek tight against his hand and he finds it where it’s hiding down between them, “... I didn’t thank you for that. When I realized you were helping _me_ … and he had no clue… it made me so happy I felt dizzy, Sangwoo.”

“ _That's_ the part you liked? ... Jesus, you're a weirdo,” Sangwoo chuckles, but it’s more gratified than mean, already easing back down to a simmer, and Bum knows he hit on a right answer. “But I guess that makes sense, given how you freaked out at the end... Didn’t I tell you you’d be fine?”

“You did, thank you,” Bum says, though he hadn’t been reassured at all at the time. He guesses it was sweet of him in hindsight, and he has the irrational urge to pull Sangwoo back against his chest. He slides his hands to the back of his captor’s neck, gently asks, “Lay your head back against me?”

Sangwoo follows the dainty lead with a snort, straightens his shirt out from around Bum’s neck before he cuddles in close under his chin. Bum goes back to petting his hair in appreciation and Sangwoo huffs out the last of his irritation, more tired than anything.

“I went to a lot of trouble for you tonight, you know.”

“Hmm-mmm,” Bum sounds out, because it’s either that or ‘ _I wish you wouldn’t have._ ’ Sangwoo doesn’t seem to mind, steals his hands under Bum’s shirt to circle his waiflike waist, enraptured by how he can touch his thumbs together around it.

“Do you want to eat at the table with me tomorrow morning?” he asks after a thoughtful pause, as if Bum could refuse any request he makes. Bum goes slack under his hold and Sangwoo relaxes further against him.

“Yes, Sangwoo. I would like that very much.”

“I have some catfish I need to fix. I’ll make some for us after we take the trash out.”

Bum’s hands and breath falter for a moment, but he reorients himself with a quick and polite, “I’ll be happy to help however I can.”

“So accommodating!” Sangwoo teases him like a lover would, styles the simple compliment into something dirty and suggestive, smiles wide against his neck as he goes on, “You won’t be able to do much so soon, but that’s fine. You can sit in here and look pretty for me, right?”

“Of - of course, Sangwoo.”

“That’s enough for now, then,” Sangwoo nods in finality, lays down next to Bum so he can drift off without crushing him under his weight. “Sleep. I’ll wake you in the morning.”

Sangwoo gathers him back against his chest like a stuffed animal, kisses the top of his head once more and says, “Good night, Bum.”

He falls asleep without waiting for a response, holds Bum flush to his skin even in unconsciousness. When his entire body goes gratefully lax, Bum realizes that he was telling the truth about sleeping better when they’re together.

‘ _He must have been tired of it, too…_ ’

Bum’s last thought before he joins Sangwoo in sleep is that if he can’t get away from this man soon, his desire to escape him will die, no different from every other one of Sangwoo's victims.

He won’t waste his next chance.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Soooo, yeah, this is now part two of three. I thought I could hit all the points in two chapters, but I was mistaken. I seriously just came for some thigh fucking and it... turned into a whole thing, 'cause short and sweet is not my forte lol.
> 
> I know Sangwoo is super sweet here and one could argue he's OOC, but I firmly believe he started doling out sugar after chapter 10, ya'll. His breakdown when he thinks Bum left him in chapter 13 is key - I think the main reason he reacted that badly was because he had been being very affectionate with Bum immediately following the murder, laying it on thick, acting like the new couple he wants to be, so when he thought Bum ran away he felt his romantic gestures had been soundly rejected.
> 
> He is a sensitive serial killer, let it be known. 
> 
> But them's just my opinions, feel free to tell me different. Thank you so much to everyone who left kudos, who dropped me a bookmark and most especially to each person that took a minute to leave me a comment and encouragement. Ya'll all put me up on cloud nine and I hope you enjoyed this second part just as much :)


	3. i love him most when he can’t tell where i end and he starts

Bum opens his eyes in Sangwoo’s arms.

Sangwoo is sprawled on his back, cradling Bum’s head against his bare chest with a hand at the back of his neck, brushing a thumb along his hairline and looking down on him with half-lidded eyes. Bum has an arm thrown across Sangwoo’s stomach, fingers curled just above the waistband of his boxers, a leg hiked up over his upper thighs. Bum’s shirtsleeve is pooled around his elbow and his skirt is riding up, leaving his right leg bare all the way up to his naked groin, and dread churns in his stomach as awareness overtakes him.

“Hey,” Sangwoo says, intimate and sleep-rough.

Bum flinches from him with a gasp, attempts to snatch his arm and leg back to himself, to pull his skirt down and stutter out an apology, but Sangwoo stops him before he can. The hand at Bum’s neck pinches lightly while the other reaches down to lash under his knee, pulling his leg more securely over his captor's lap. Bum watches Sangwoo adjust his limbs as he pleases and is struck by the bizarre sensation that his legs have been amputated and replaced with wooden prosthetics in his sleep.

“It’s still early, Bum,” he soothes, generously providing an explanation for Bum’s bid to fling himself against the wall. He strokes his hand up and down the outside of Bum’s thigh, smiles when Bum quivers under his touch and says, “We don’t have to get up for another hour. Lie back down.”

“But - but, ah, I -”

Sangwoo’s smile switches to a pout, his eyebrows climbing his forehead in incredulity even as his fingers wrench into the wan flesh wrapping Bum’s femur in warning.

“So eager to start the day! And here I was thinking you’d be more than willing to have some skinship with me, Bum… was I wrong?”

Bum chokes at Sangwoo’s word choice, barely registers the pain the man is putting him through beneath his dejected tone and childish expression. He stares up at Sangwoo with eyes so wide the pale sunlight flooding in from the doorway lightens his irises into pewter patinas. He lays an appeasing hand on Sangwoo’s flexing bicep and whispers with anxious affection, “No, Sangwoo, of course you’re not wrong. I’d - I would love to lie here with you.”

Sangwoo’s sullen frown stays, but he releases his grip on Bum’s thigh and smooths over the fingerprint bruises forming on it. Bum resists the urge to fidget under the soothing touch, his blush dimming to a dusky pink and his eyes falling to half-mast as Sangwoo tilts his head down at him, studies his face far too carefully.

“Then why are you so intent on getting up?”

He sounds half his age, a volatile mix of moody and accusatory, and Bum knows his next response will determine the course of his day for better or worse, that he must pick his words with precision to avoid tumbling straight back down the basement stairs. He swallows down his nerves and breathes out his tension against Sangwoo’s chest, reaches down to rest a hand over the one Sangwoo has on his tender thigh.

“I was just… thinking about the trash, Sangwoo.”

Sangwoo blinks, lets go of Bum’s neck to hang an arm over his slim shoulders. He turns his other hand around to return Bum’s touch and asks, “What’re you worrying about that for? I told you I’d get it before breakfast...”

“I know, I know, I’ll just be happy to have, um -” Bum dithers over which pronoun to use, quickly decides it’s best to be explicit given how well Sangwoo reacted to his frankness last night, “- ah, _him_... out of the house. I wasn’t thinking, Sangwoo, I’m sorry. Of course it can wait.”

A dark snicker reverberates through Sangwoo’s chest, sends an electric chill racing up Bum’s spine, but Bum knows appealing to his captor’s sick sense of humor is far from the worst thing he could do right now.

“What... you don’t like company staying over? That’s so cold, Bum! He needed a place to sleep. He was in no condition to go anywhere last night.”

His snicker turns into a throaty chuckle and butterflies blaze to life in Bum’s belly; they flare and flash against his insides, leave him feverish and fizzy-headed with happiness. Sangwoo is sharing an inside joke with him. Sangwoo is holding him close and laughing over something only the two of them know about, something between them and only them that no one else can ever touch.

Bum imagines a red string with either end looped around their necks, tethering them together in body and mind, and he can’t help a faint smile.

He slips his left arm under Sangwoo’s right shoulder, circles his hand around to brush his fingertips against Sangwoo’s neck, stage-whispers on a whim, “Well... I guess he _was_ in pieces.”

Bum has the rare pleasure of seeing Sangwoo’s lips go slack with true surprise, his eyes opening wide enough Bum can make out the flecks of charcoal edging his pupils, but only for a second before the man breaks out into full-bodied, irrepressible laughter. It’s heady and deep and so obviously uncontrollable that Bum’s cheeks burn hot as live-coals, his palms beading up in a clammy sweat he doesn’t notice because Sangwoo is honest-to-goodness _laughing_. Eyes pinched shut, head thrown back, chest heaving under Bum’s upper body - the whole lock, stock and barrel of it.

Sangwoo lets go of Bum’s hand to cover half his face as he works to rein himself in, unable to switch off his reaction or flip to a response like he usually can. Bum watches as he struggles to regain control, head swimming in a whirlpool blitz of serotonin and dopamine with which no drug on earth could hope to compare.

He knocked the bottom out of Sangwoo’s self-restraint. He reduced him to a fit of genuine hysterics. Reason and circumstance fall away as he memorizes how Sangwoo’s eyes crinkle up at the corners; how his lips stretch back to flash ivory white teeth and healthy pink gums; how his Adam’s apple dips and bobs under the force of his convulsive laughter.

Sangwoo has a face that belongs on magazine covers; strapping on Men’s Health and dapper on GQ and sexy on Vanity Fair. He’s the type of handsome that makes the world feel at once breathtaking and outrageously unfair, and Bum muses that, in another life, Sangwoo could have easily been a pop idol. A pinup in a teenage girl’s room, face framed by coronas of pink Sharpie hearts and pink lipstick kisses, portrait embossed with the commandment to _Keep Calm and Love Oh Sangwoo._

Bum imagines hundreds of young women fawning over him at autograph signings in bookstores, queuing up in a mile long line and waiting hours just for the chance to get his signature on a poster of himself. Bum can see them straining to touch his pant leg as he performs up on a platform stage, screaming through smoke machines and laser light displays. Sangwoo could get a girl to lose her footing with a devil-may-care grin and well-placed wink, could probably get her to faint with words alone if he put his mind to it, and Bum wonders with sick fascination if stardom would curb or complicate his killing habit.

“I can’t believe it,” Sangwoo says thickly once he’s brought his amusement down to a dazzling grin, squeezing Bum tight around the shoulders and snapping him out of his reverie. Bum’s blush spreads to his ears as Sangwoo slides his hand from his face to stare down at him with bright, piercing eyes, voice rough with mirth, “You told a fucking joke, Bum. I didn’t think you even knew _how_.”

His words are biting, but his tone is toothless, for once more charmed than charming. Bum traces tingling fingers over the outline of Sangwoo’s pectorals and the swell of his jugular vein, can feel the younger man’s heart pounding and blood rushing from the exertion of his laughter. He can’t maintain eye contact as he shrugs and mumbles modestly, “Oh, uhm... I do, a bit, like... You’re right, I should cut him some slack… or whichever way you slice it, he still needs to go...?”

Sangwoo _wheezes_ , and Bum couldn’t stifle his giggle if his life depended on it.

When Sangwoo tenses under him, Bum is reminded that it very well could. He snaps his eyes up to Sangwoo’s frightfully blank face, starts drawing his hands back to himself, stuttering out, “ _Ah_ , uh, I - I didn’t mean - !”

But then Sangwoo is shoving him on his back, riveting his hands to either side of Bum’s face, draping over him heavier than a denim quilt weighted with cherry stones. Sangwoo strokes his thumbs over his supplicating lips, slips his forefingers across his calescent cheeks, stares down at him like he’s trying to sear his captive’s face into his memory forever, like he’s -

“Your laugh is so _cute_ , Bum.”

\- _infatuated_.

Bum gapes up at him, couldn’t be more shocked if he stuck his hands to a live conductor on a high-voltage transmission tower. Astonished tears well up in his eyes and it’s like the first time Sangwoo kissed him, heedless of the abalone porridge in their mouths, squalid and grungy and exploratory. Sangwoo is complimenting him, tenderly touching him, looking at him like he _wants him_ and his mind suppresses the memories of this man smashing his left leg with a sledgehammer, slitting his throat open with a butcher knife, punching him black and blue and bloody on the kitchen floor and in the laundry room and atop the hood of his car in the abandoned avenue beyond the front gate.

All he’s left with is the aching, empty, love-starved thought, ‘ _Isn’t this what couples do?_ ’

“Hey, hey, don’t start that now... always with the waterworks, such a sniveling little crybaby...” Sangwoo murmurs, too sweet to be mean, swiping away Bum’s tears and leaning down to brush their foreheads together. He pecks just beneath Bum’s open lips, the corners of his mouth, the tip of his nose, and whispers, “You cry so much, but I’ve never heard you laugh before... It’s adorable, Bum. Do it again.”

_“O-oh.”_

Sangwoo’s flattery forces the air from Bum’s lungs as effectively as a punch to the gut. He’s so exposed he might as well be laying on an operating table under a surgical lighthead, abdominal cavity flayed open for Sangwoo to fiddle with his entrails, toy with his insides, rearrange the viscera that constitutes his very being until he’s nothing more than a reflection of Sangwoo’s madness - and of course, that _is_ what Sangwoo is doing. Bum knows that’s what he’s _always_ doing, whether he’s rubbing ice cubes and Silvadene cream into his scalded forearm or wrenching his arm behind his back in an excruciating wristlock, but Bum can’t bring himself to care under Sangwoo’s captivated expression and cosseting hands.

He lifts his own hands to lay over Sangwoo’s on his face, looks up at him with dolorous, adoring eyes, says downy-soft and serious, “Okay then, how about… I want him to go, Sangwoo. Hasn’t he... stuck around long enough already…?”

Sangwoo blinks, bewildered for a beat, but he quickly cottons on to the black pun. He dips down to press his forehead against Bum’s, turns his hands around to push his captive’s back against the pillow, chuckling playfully in perfect counterpoint to Bum’s quiet giggling. It’s an unsettling duet, one that belongs inside the halls of the Gonjiam Psychiatric Hospital in Gwangju, but neither of them give a damn that they sound like bedlamites.

“That is _atrocious_ , Bum, how can you say shit like that with a straight face?” he says against Bum’s lips, fiery and formidable and so, so fond. His approval garrotes Bum’s guilt, bleeds out his blame, smothers his self-condemnation, and compared to Sangwoo’s favor, the man piled in six polyethylene garbage bags in the basement is inconsequential; the wife and child he left behind immaterial; the life he led insignificant.

Bum isn’t thinking about maladaptive coping mechanisms, dissociation and resignation and dark, revolting humor. He’s not thinking about how illogical his desperation for Sangwoo’s validation is, or how the unreal stress he’s under is splintering his psyche clear to pieces. Lying beneath this man in his bedroom, basking in his warmth and acceptance, he simply can’t; no more than he could transform ash back into wood, or reverse the rusting of iron, or separate sugar once dissolved in water.

The only thing that matters is that Sangwoo is happy with him.

“I don’t know… I’ve never really told anyone a joke before,” he tips his head to the side in curiosity, artless and obliging. “Should I make a face when I tell one?”

“Nah...” Sangwoo says, shakes his head with a smoky smile, eyes glinting slyly as he angles in for a kiss, “... your delivery was perfect, Bum. You couldn’t have done anything better.”

Bum senses the double meaning there, knows that Sangwoo is referencing something other than the subject at hand, but his ability to interpret cryptic wordplay is shot through by Sangwoo’s tongue in his mouth.

“S-Sangwoo, _mmhn_ , wait, I _ha_ -haven’t -”

\- _brushed my teeth_ , he was going to say, but Sangwoo hums carelessly, raises a hand to pry his jaw open and shut him up, licks into his mouth sordid and unreserved. Hygiene is the last thing on his mind, and somehow that makes Bum’s toes curl in the blanket, his belly corkscrew around itself, his heart corrode with unhinged gratitude.

‘ _I’m so disgusting and he still... so kind. I love how kind -_ ’

Sangwoo’s right knee jostles his his left leg and wildfire ignites inside his shin, singes up his thigh-hip-spine, sets his brain to burning with pain he can’t hide or ignore. He winces sharply with a groan, pulls back in on himself, pushes away from the kiss reflexively -

“ _Oi._ ”

Sangwoo’s succinct warning is cut from stone and Bum goes still under the weight of it, wastes no time in explaining himself shrill and short-winded, “Sangwoo, please don’t be - it’s - my leg, it just -” he swallows hard, goes on low and emphatic, “- _it hurts_ , and you - accidentally, ah, uh - I’m - I didn’t - not _on purpose_ , Sangwoo. It was just - ju-just, _ah_ -”

“Your leg...?” Sangwoo isn’t listening to his stuttering, looking down between them to inspect Bum’s legs, lying awkward and pigeon-toed and bare besides the bandages against the futon, his skirt still hiked up around his groin. It takes a moment for recognition to pass into Sangwoo’s eyes, to shape his mouth into a little circle of understanding, and Bum wonders, not for the first time, if he sometimes forgets the horrible things he’s done to him.

They don’t talk about it, so it could be an amnesia they share every now and again.

Bum nods up at him in frantic agreement, burgeoning panic bouncing around in his head as Sangwoo frowns in thought. The man leans up on an elbow, considers his captive’s maimed, housebound legs, and looks askance at the open first-aid kit next to the bed. He hems and haws, pushing his bedhead bangs back from his forehead and chewing the inside of his cheek, before he comes to a decision with a magnanimous sigh and a lenient shrug.

His mouth is chivalrous, his eyes charitable; a prince offering a prisoner a privileged position among his court, rhyme and reason be damned. Bum worries his lip as his panic dies down to pins and needles prickling beneath his skin, relief panning through him at Sangwoo’s pendulum swing back to permissive.

“Well... I suppose one more time wouldn’t hurt… No more after this, though, okay?”

He sits up to rummage through the kit, and in short order produces an amber, six dram pill bottle with a triumphant flourish and rattle. Bum’s jaw drops. It’s a different pill container from before, the vitamin bottle full of narcotics Sangwoo had thrown at his writhing back in the basement as he shouted for him to _shut up_ , but Bum has a good idea what Sangwoo means by ‘one more time.’ His heart spurs into a gallop and his forehead breaks out into a cold sweat, cloying and damp, as eggshell-fragile anticipation blossoms in his chest.

_‘Painkillers…?’_

Sangwoo crawls up, sits cross-legged at the top of the futon next to his head. He lazily plays catch with the bottle, tossing it up and down, up and down, up and down; he chuckles when Bum’s owl-huge, hopeful eyes track its movement up toward the ceiling and back down to his waiting palm.

“Look at you, so greedy for it… you look like a dog ready to lick boot for a bone, Bum.”

He’s beyond chipper, beaming at Bum, dangling the bottle by the tips of his fingers high over his captive’s head. He swirls the pills around inside, and the faint _sursur_ they make tumbling over each other booms thunder-loud in Bum’s ears. It’s a sudden, overwhelming din that erupts inside of him; it froths up his blood and buzzes in his bones. His mouth turns to cotton and his fingers flex on nothing and an intolerable itch breaks out beneath all of his bandages, because Sangwoo hasn’t let him have anything for pain since the day he shoved his offer of hot tea back in his face and called him a _motherfucker_.

_‘Why would I waste this expensive shit on a foul-mouthed, ungrateful little brat? Huh? Ugh... you need to quit, anyway, you look strung out as fuck and I don’t need you smacked out of your gourd all the goddamn time. You already act retarded enough without this shit doping you up into some braindead zombie, and it’s been long enough, anyways... Your legs should be better by now.’_

They still hurt _so_ _badly_ , though, the right halfway functional and the left a constant burden, and that’s not mentioning the hole healing in his throat; the carousel of bruises littering his body; the perpetual low-tempo pulse of headaches threatening to flare up into debilitating migraines. If Sangwoo is offering him temporary relief from his pain ( _‘- so generous, after I was so_ rude _, I can’t believe he’s -’_ ), Bum can hardly reject him.

“D’you want them, Bum?” Sangwoo coos, lording the bottle over him with delight, breath shallow and pupils blown wide as if he’s the one that needs to lay off narcotics. “Go on and tell me, then. C’mon.”

“I…” he exhales sharply, tugs at the sleeve of Sangwoo’s Henley in the crook of his elbow, says shaky as tectonic plates grinding together, “I do, I do, _I want them_ , Sangwoo, _please_.”

“Jesus, you’re practically panting for them. I’ve heard of easy targets, but you’re fucking ridiculous, Bum.”

Sangwoo snickers like a schoolboy with a mean crush, snide and affectionate, before leaning down to catch Bum’s eyes dead-on, shaking the bottle right next to his ear as he whispers indecently, “Wouldja beg for one? … How about barking for me to fix you up, huh? Can you speak for me, boy?”

Bum blushes so red it tips over into purple, humiliation fissuring through his gratitude like stress-fractures on a sunbaked highway, but no is not an answer he’s willing or able to give. He gnaws at his lower lip, straightens his skirt out over his lap, stretches his sleeve down past his hand just to pull it back up to his elbow again, before properly returning his captor’s gaze to ask, seeking and submissive, “... What should I say, Sangwoo?”

Sangwoo pecks his cheek sweet and dry, says in slow consideration, “Let’s see now. I could get you to beg, and I could get you to yip at me like some rat-chasing, pint-sized mongrel I took in off the street…” he pauses, lets his silence drag out until Bum assents to his claims with an embarrassed nod; when his captive does so, his smirk widens to a cavalier grin, a cruel brand of tenderness entering his eyes as he concludes good-naturedly, “... but I won’t make you, Bum. You’ve been such a good boy lately, and good behavior deserves to be rewarded.”

He sits back up, spins the top off the bottle and dumps four daffodil yellow, stadium oval pills into the palm of his hand, before screwing the cap back on tight and stowing it back in its caddy in the first aid kit. He turns back to Bum, sets a steady hand on the side of his face and graces him with a reassuring smile, “Don’t worry, I know they look different, but they’re the same thing as before. Namebrand this time, that’s all. Just open your mouth for me, okay?”

Bum obeys him no different from how hearts obey the command to beat, how soldiers obey the order to march, how automata obey the directive to move. It’s compulsory as conscription into the service, thoughtless as breathing in sleep; as Sangwoo depresses his tongue with a thumb and shoves the pills as far down his throat as he can manage them, Bum observes the telescopic thought that, for all he knows, this man could be feeding him cyanide tablets right now.

Sangwoo taps Bum’s mouth closed by his chin, massages his throat with firm fingers, watches his throat work around the pills as if it’s spellbinding, and Bum wonders, worshipful and hazy, if he could even get upset if Sangwoo decided to kill him so softly.

Unsurprisingly, Bum swallows semisynthetic opioids easier than hangover stew spiked with rat poison. Sangwoo continues massaging his throat, scuffs his nails around the edges of Bum’s injury, steadily progresses into scratching the itchy, mending wound through the daisy white bandages until Bum is squirming against the futon, eyes slipping almost closed and lips splitting open to let out mouse-tiny sighs.

“It’s nice, right?” Sangwoo asks, absorbed by how Bum wriggles under his fingertips. Bum looks up at him through crescent eyes, remembers Sangwoo saying the same thing after shoving an ice cube in his mouth, tapping his cold, swollen cheek and calling him _cutie_.

 _‘Make me feel nice, too…’_ Sangwoo had said before kissing him, hands scaffolding his neck as Bum shored himself up by his captor’s forearms; the man had tongued the melting ice cube back out of Bum’s mouth and into his own, stared down at his captive’s pie-eyed, punch-drunk face with a flirtatious smirk and told him, ‘ _That’s more like it…_ ’

… but that had been before Bum crossed the line at the bottom of the stairs and tried to escape the cage of Sangwoo’s heart and home. He remembers Sangwoo singing that stirring song at the top of the front porch steps, throwing his arms out into the sunshowery evening and shouting over the music in his ears, _‘I like you! I love you! I’ll do anything! I’ll…_ haha _… that was some amazing acting… I almost fell for -’_

Bum shies from the misgivings fighting to play first fiddle in his mind. They flicker to the surface in staticky snatches, outlines blurred as they skip by almost too fast to make out; Sangwoo beating him against the Nissan’s slippery windshield; Sangwoo wrapping the noose around his neck and asking him if he’s ever been on an airplane before; Sangwoo yanking his head back with a hand over his mouth and slitting his throat open like an animal bred for slaughter; Sangwoo toying with the bloodless, anemic flesh dangling from his chin after toweling the incision clean and -

_“Mmm, oww!”_

Sangwoo draws his hand back from the red rings studding through Bum's white bandages, holds up his fingers between their faces to show Bum the blood on his fingertips with an apologetic smile.

“ _Ah_ … it’s bleeding again... my bad. I didn’t mean to reopen it like that. I thought I wasn’t going too hard.”

His contrite words are undermined by his worrisome fascination with the way the blood fills the dips and whorls of his fingerprints, how it gleams like burnished copper in the salt-white light. Bum charies back against the wall, shields his raw neck with his hands, eyes his captor rapt and cautious, and Sangwoo loses interest in the blood more suddenly than he found it. He follows Bum across the futon to lay a hand on his cringing side, casts a long, crimson shadow as he looks down on his captive in frowning confusion.

“Hey, what’s that face for...? Are you angry? I really didn’t mean to hurt you this time… it was an accident, Bum. Come back over here.”

_‘This time. This time. This time.’_

Bum grimaces, can’t hold Sangwoo’s eyes as he shrinks away from his touch. He has a crystal-queasy moment where he is sure he wants to tell Sangwoo to take his hands off of him, to snap at him that he’s done enough already, to beg out raw and bitter, _‘Stop messing with my head, stop confusing me, stop making it so hard to hate you. You’re so cruel to be kind so just stop, just stop, please_ stop _-’_

\- but then Sangwoo sweeps him up to cradle him against his chest like there’s no possession in the world he could possibly cherish more, and Bum’s moment of clarity shatters into an acquiescence so complete it aches. His captor bridles his face with easy hands, bits his mouth with sweet kisses, reins him back in with apologies that tiptoe around sorry and work like lucky charms.

“Don’t be mad,” he says, as if he can’t stand the thought of Bum being upset with him for a second. “You just looked like you liked it so much, I got a little carried away… I shouldn’t have. You know I want it to heal properly… I’ll fix your bandages after breakfast and I won’t mess with it again, how’s that?”

Bum nods through the fading sting, slips back into the house of mirrors in his head, where mania throws back desire and obsession gives forth love. By and far more clearly than any memory he can conjure of Sangwoo hurting him, Bum remembers the long months spent meditating over what Sangwoo’s hands would feel like on his skin, lying on a bare mattress in a filthy shoebox and wondering if Sangwoo’s touch could chase away the lonely lamella sheathing his very bones. He’s run over the same ground so many times it’s hollowed grooves in his thought processes, paths of least resistance that chant, _‘So kind. I love how kind he is. So kind. I love how kind he is. So kind. I love how kind he is. Sangwoo. Sangwoo. Oh Sangwoo.’_

Tears smart at his eyes as Sangwoo slides his hands beneath Bum’s shirt to lay palms on his lower back, to both pull and invite him closer. Bum readily accepts his offer to embrace, winds his arms around Sangwoo’s shoulders, sinks sidesaddle down into his lap as he says in enduring acceptance, “Of course, that sounds - that’s more than fine, Sangwoo. Thank you.”

Sangwoo smiles at him in contented relief. It’s the same smile he gave when Bum told him he understood why they couldn’t go to the hospital for his legs, and Bum smiles back now no different from then. Sangwoo hugs him tight around the middle, skims his arms up Bum’s shirt until his hands can bracket the backs of his shoulders, sighs deeply at the increased skin to skin contact, and Bum hears his grandmother tell him over the creak of her wicker rocking chair and the balmy scent of seaspray on the air, _‘Be careful what you wish for, sonja, for your wish may come true.’_

He bursts into a sharp, close-mouthed sob. Tears streak down his cheeks to gather at his chin, his lower lip wobbling and eyebrows scrunching up in despair. Sangwoo’s face flickers to inscrutable, hands on Bum’s shoulders doubling up viciously, but when all Bum does is cling harder to him and sniffle in his lap, he leans back to a smile and lowers his hands to rub lazy circles into Bum’s back.

“Shh, shh, hey there, hey... I said that’s enough crying, didn’t I?”

“I’m so- _ruh_ … I’m sorry, S-Sangwoo.”

“You are,” Sangwoo says agreeably, kissing just above the bandage on Bum’s collarbone. “Now c’mon and quit your whining. Don’t you ever get tired of it? You’ve already cried enough for a lifetime since you moved in with me, I swear...”

Sangwoo’s statement works on Bum’s tears like the startle reflex works on hiccups, snaps him out of sobbing as he tries to make sense of Sangwoo’s words. He spends a full minute parsing and processing them, but still the only response he can come up with is a damp and dumbfounded, “W-what?”

Sangwoo’s hands still. He looks up at Bum through the tops of his eyes, says flat and cool, “What do you mean, what?”

“I - I mean, uhm,” Bum gulps like he’s about to step through a minefield, tries again softer, “I just mean, I didn’t - I didn’t know that you thought of it...” he glances around the room, can’t meet Sangwoo’s eyes as he finishes weakly, “... like that.”

Sangwoo stares at him like he’s never found someone so astoundingly stupid in all his life. When he speaks it’s insultingly slow and strongly enunciated.

“We live together. You eat here, you sleep here, you stay here. What else would I think?”

Bum flushes in embarrassment, shrugs and mumbles at the drooping neckline of his t-shirt, “I dunno, Sangwoo, maybe that I’m just, ah… a…” he casts about for a suitable word, can only come up with a doubtful, “... visitor?”

“A _visitor?_ ”

Bum can tell from the way Sangwoo says the word like it leaves a bad taste in his mouth that his captor has never considered him anything of the sort. Warmth fans out from Bum’s belly as the opiates absorb into his stomach lining, and he nods into his collarbone.

“Look at me, Bum,” Sangwoo demands from the bottom of his chest, and Bum locks eyes with him immediately, cheeks red and wet, breathing labored and uneven. Sangwoo goes back to kneading circles into his back, asks him quietly, “Do you think I let visitors wear my clothes?”

Bum glances down at Sangwoo’s black and red Henley swamping his spare ribs, blushes darker in something other than embarrassment and looks back at the man he’s sitting on with a shy, “No, Sangwoo.”

“Do you think I let visitors sleep in my bed with me?”

“No, Sangwoo.”

Sangwoo skids a hand around to Bum’s front to thumb at his left nipple, and when Bum gasps he takes the opportunity to seal their mouths together. He resumes the kiss Bum had withdrawn from before, picks up right where he left off licking over the backs of Bum’s molars and the roof of his mouth and the insides of his cheeks. He twines their tongues together sleek and slavering, isn’t satisfied until drool replaces Bum’s tears and glistens wetly on both of their chins. Even then he lingers at the tip of Bum’s tongue, laps over the fronts of his teeth and the connective tissue between his inner lip and gumline, suckling and nibbling on his lips as if he’s loathe to stop the kiss now he’s started it in earnest.

When he finally does pull away, a trail of saliva connects their mouths, the air is hot enough to melt diamonds between them, and Bum is no longer the only one blushing.

“Do you think I would do…” Sangwoo says heavily, breaking the cord of spit and shifting upwards so Bum can feel his erection through the thin fabrics separating them, “... _this_ with ‘just a visitor,’ Bum?”

Bum’s hands and feet start to tingle, oxycodone mixing with Sangwoo’s bedroom voice and hitting his bloodstream in a warm, pleasant rush. His pupils dilate as he marvels at Sangwoo’s flushed and panting face. He'll never get used to being the one to turn Sangwoo on, and he answers in a devout whisper, “No, Sangwoo.”

“So… if you wear my clothes, and you sleep in my bed, and we do this -” Sangwoo grinds up against Bum’s bottom again in unneeded explanation, just to smirk at how the older man shivers against him, “- what does that make you?”

“ _Ohh_ … I don’t - I don’t know the right, _uhm_ … word for it, Sangwoo.”

“ _I think you do,_ ” Sangwoo singsongs into his ear. He slides an arm under Bum’s knees, mindful of his injuries, gently tugs them up until Bum is curled in a ball in his lap and he can kiss at Bum’s kneecaps. He noses along the hemline of his captive’s skirt, pushes it farther up his sun-starved thighs, chuckles when Bum holds fast to his shoulders to balance in the new position and squirms against the tickling sensation in so intimate an area.

“My live-in guest… my roommate… my domestic partner...?” Sangwoo throws out tongue-in-cheek guesses and snickers when Bum chokes on the last one, pools Bum’s skirt into the cradle of his pelvis and breathes over his bared inner thighs slow and deliberate.

“Hmm, none of those have the right ring to them. How about just…” Sangwoo shifts Bum into sitting side by side, keeps Bum’s arms around his neck as he lowers them both down to lay flat against the futon; he kisses Bum’s spit-slick mouth again, downtempo and softcore but still too hot to hold, before drawing back a hairsbreadth to finish over Bum’s lips, close-fisted and carnivorous, “... _mine._ ”

Bum can’t tell if the cozy, sheltered feeling consuming him is from the pain medicine or Sangwoo’s possessiveness. Regardless of the source, he feels more comforted than he has in weeks, years, forever. He struggles to rouse alarm or unease or even concern over Sangwoo’s profound sense of entitlement over his life, but tangles himself up in feeling treasured instead of terrified.

Bum lowers a hand from Sangwoo’s shoulder to collar his half-bloodied bandages, hyperaware of how focused Sangwoo is on his every move. He presses in until he can feel the latent throb of his reopened wound through the painkillers subduing his nervous system. He sucks softly on his teeth, closes his eyes to see Jihae at her desk, hears her dismiss his plea for a reply to his letter with an impassive, ‘ _Next time._ ’

She never gave him next time. She spurned him, rejected him, cut him out of her life like he was a cancer eating up her chances for a happy-ever-after, and that was the first time Bum realized that the opposite of love is not hate.

It is indifference.

It’s refusing to give a lovestruck loser so much as a _no thanks, I don’t return your feelings_. It’s thinking another human being isn’t worth the smallest consideration; not a smile, or a hello, or even the time of day. It’s telling someone next time over and over, knowing good and well next time will never come.

Bum imagines Sangwoo giving him the cold shoulder, looking down his nose at him with unamused disdain, turning his back on him with nothing more than a disaffected, ‘ _Just die. Die and disappear._ ’

Bum gets blood on his fingertips as he digs deeper into his idly bleeding wound. He tries to make it hurt worse than the thought of Sangwoo ignoring him. He can’t. He doesn’t think anything could hurt as much as the idea that Sangwoo could one day decide that he’s not worth keeping. That he’s not worth abalone porridge, or cotton bandages, or prescription painkillers.

That he’s not worth holding on a Sunday morning and calling ‘mine.’

Sangwoo yanks Bum’s hand away from his neck, and when Bum opens his eyes the expression on his captor’s face takes his breath away.

Sangwoo hovers over him, suffocating and airless as coal smog, impatiently awaiting a reply. The corners of his eyes are pinched with growing irritation, but all Bum sees is the twenty-four carat yearning seizing the ashen centers. Sangwoo opens his mouth to snap something, but Bum cuts him off impulsively, takes the chance to surge up and kiss him back, straining to fit their hands together, striving to explain his feelings through touch alone.

Sangwoo pries him off and pushes him back down one-handed, starts to snarl out, “What the _fuck_ -”

\- but he stops short when he sees Bum’s face. His captive stares up at him like he hung the moon and the stars in the sky; like if he isn’t the word of god, then god never spoke, and Bum whispers out in a voice that could deify the devil himself, “You… you promise you mean it, Sangwoo? You’re not playing?”

Sangwoo flops to an elbow next to him, all displeasure forgotten. Bum can tell from his surprise and curiosity that that wasn’t the response he was expecting. He eyes Bum through intrigued slits, asks pointedly, “What if I am?”

Bum starts to tear up again and Sangwoo rolls his eyes, abandons his line of questioning with a sigh before he even starts in on it. “How the hell did you function before you met me? You’re so fucking needy, Jesus…”

Bum answers with a pathetic snuffle, and Sangwoo bars an arm across his body, pulls Bum flush against his side. “Of course I mean it, you dipshit. Are you seriously questioning my intentions after all the effort I’ve put into you?”

“N-no, Sangwoo! I just -”

“- need constant validation because you’ve got all the emotional fortitude of a sixteen-year-old girl?”

Bum shuts up. He tries to tuck his head under Sangwoo’s chin to hide his swimming eyes and weak upper lip, but Sangwoo grabs his face before he can, tilts him up to see his captor’s fond smile.

“My Bum. My little Yoon Bum,” he says warmly. His smile stretches into an ecstatic grin when Bum goes back to looking at him like kissing his feet would be an honor. He goes on in a voice that reminds Bum of a spinning candyfloss machine at a trade fair, a sort of molten-sugar rasp and purr.

“Y’know, for a pervert, you sure are bashful. It’s cute how embarrassed you get over something you wanted bad enough to lie to police officers and break into my house.”

“S-Sangwoo…”

“ _Abandoned little stray_... so desperate for a place to belong...”

Bum’s face twists up in agony and he laughs affectionately. He cups Bum’s cheek and rubs their noses together in an Eskimo kiss as sweet as it is surreal.

“You chose me to keep you,” he says with relish. “You sought me out. You came to me. You want to be mine.”

Sangwoo sounds both like a child bonding with his pet and a young man expressing devotion to his lover. His conviction is absolute, his pleasure palpable in the air. While he’s not telling the whole truth, none of his declarations are wholly untrue, and Bum nods up at him in silent agreement.

Sangwoo beams at him in return, and he really is just… unreasonably handsome, Bum thinks molasses-slow as his eyelids start to slide closed. His whole body feels heavy, like his muscles have been replaced with warm, wet cement. His nerves are unfurling into a blackhole of bliss, and he sinks bonelessly against Sangwoo’s pillow.

“Is it hitting you already? It hasn’t even been ten minutes.”

“Low tolerance...?” Bum hazards a lethargic guess and his voice sounds far away to his own ears. He’s not completely out of it, but could easily lay still and quiet for the next six hours.

“More like no tolerance. You haven’t had a dose in a few weeks, and you weigh about as much as a bled lamb, so it figures four would knock you sideways. I bet two beers would have you shit-faced under a table, huh?”

Bum pulls a face at the thought of alcohol, the fuzzy memory of counting soju bottles lined up on a kitchen windowsill surfacing in his mind for a moment and making his stomach protest valiantly against his repressed gag reflex.

“Hm... you’d win that bet, Sangwoo.”

“Lightweight,” Sangwoo teases, running a hand up Bum’s pale, emaciated thigh again. Bum moans out loud, blushes red as a prohibition sign when he sees Sangwoo’s excited smirk and turns his head to the wall to inhale shakily.

“You feel nice now, Bum?” Sangwoo asks knowingly, slipping his hand under Bum’s skirt to rest less than an inch from his limp cock. Bum holds statue still, breath going shallow and superficial. He forces himself to nod again.

“That’s good… because there’s something I wanna try with you, okay?” Sangwoo pretends to ask for his permission, slides his hand over to follow the line of Bum’s hip, peeks his fingertips above the skirt’s waistline. Bum bites his lip, clenches his hands in the sheet beneath them. His eyes drift to the closet door in sluggish anxiety, and Sangwoo notices before he can catch himself.

“Still worried about the trash?” Sangwoo asks, far too solicitous, and Bum snaps his eyes back to him, tries to say _no, not at all_ through a thickening tongue and a head full of foreboding, but Sangwoo is already drawing back, decision clear in the line of his shoulders. He turns to the first aid kit at the foot of the futon and pulls out a four ounce laminated tube labeled in a language Bum can’t read, sets it on top of the blankets and locks the kit up with a _snick-snick_ that rings overloud in Bum’s ears.

“I’ll bring it up while we wait for the medicine to completely kick in. I don’t want this to hurt for you.”

Bum pales. He doesn’t think he could think of what to say to that dead-sober, let alone climbing higher into the clouds with each passing second. Sangwoo smiles patiently at his shocked face, lays a tender hand on his bandaged calf, says comfortingly, “Don’t worry. We’re not going all the way yet… I wanna save that for our first anniversary together, Bum.”

Sangwoo pats his lower leg and stands with the kit. Bum numbly watches him walk across the room to slide open the closet door, set the kit on the topmost shelf instead of the floor where it had been last night, and throw wide the trapdoor to the basement.

He smiles at Bum one more time, and he descends the stairs.

As soon as his blond head disappears into the darkness, Bum brings nerveless, bloody fingers to his mouth. He feels the white snow begin to pulse along the edges of his vision before he sees it. He smells sulfur and vinegar and sausages sweetened with maple syrup. He hears a man scream bloody murder.

“ _Hey!_ What’re you doing? Fuck, stay away!” he shouts from the basement. “Stay away! Stay away! _Stay away! Stay_ -”

Bum covers his ears, but he doesn’t think humming Sangwoo’s favorite song is going to help him this time.

_‘Tell me next time this happens, okay? This is something I need to know.’_

Bum curls his knees up to his chest and whimpers hopelessly as he listens to Sangwoo's footsteps, the flick of the lightswitch, the _fwump_ and _thwack_ of heavy bags full of wet waste rolling over each other and onto concrete. His stomach somersaults down into his lower intestines, his heart struggles to beat harder against the constraints of his drugged cardiovascular system, and a cold sweat breaks out over his entire body.  

“Let me go...! Let me _go_...! Please, please, please, _please , please_ -”

Sangwoo is coming back up the stairs. They creak and complain under the added weight of one third of a man, and Bum groans as hysterical exasperation builds up inside of him.

Of course a normal morning in bed with Sangwoo was too much to ask.  

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yeah, this is part three of four now, because I majorly dig blue-balling myself, I'm a sucker for excessive detail and I can't plan a story out for shit lol. Please lemme know what you thought of this chapter! The next one will be the last, no lie this time, and there shall be glorious thigh-fucking and delicious catfish breakfast ;)


	4. i lock him up in the dark to watch him stare at the stars

The dead man quiets down into threadbare weeping as Sangwoo trudges out of the basement with the last two garbage bags. They’re opaque and cobalt blue with directions printed on them in black - general rules for recycling, pickup times for their neighborhood, fine warnings for non-compliance. They’re the official general waste bags for their district; the same kind Bum used to watch Sangwoo buy from the 7-Eleven on the corner of Nambu and Miaro sometimes before breaking into his house.

Spying on Sangwoo as he casually flirted with cute cashiers in convenience stores seems like a long time ago. To think, Bum had once eaten holes in his heart over the way Sangwoo flashed toothpaste commercial smiles at the girl working third shift. He once wished he could _be_ her, if only for a moment, just to have that smile directed at him.  

He now knows that Sangwoo thinks that girl is such an obnoxious cunt that he can’t decide if he’d rather shove a chainsaw down her throat or ram it up her cradle of filth.

… Sangwoo has a colorful vocabulary.

It took some getting used to. In all the time Bum spent listening in on his conversations with college friends and friendly cashiers, he never once heard the man utter so much as a _goshdang_ , so his foul mouth came as a bit of a surprise.

So did the bound, gagged and blindfolded woman in his basement, but Bum only thinks about her when Sangwoo makes him wear her underwear. The black and green ones with the leopard print on the sides, the ones that feel like they cost more than a month’s rent. Sangwoo likes to slip them on him and finger the lace trimming and little green bow, reminisce about how the young woman who used to own them begged Bum for help until her voice gave out on her; how she wept silently as she made every effort to reach out to him and shake him awake. She spent the last of her strength in vain, looking for help from the person most unable to help her, and Sangwoo still finds the futility of her struggle funny.   

_‘What did she think you were gonna do if you woke up? Break a tow chain and untie her so you could both limp up to the bolted trapdoor? … She was so fucking stupid it hurt, Bum. You should have seen the way she looked at you when I -’_

Sangwoo drops the bags against the wall opposite the futon in a row with the other four, and the sopping _squelch_ they make as they settle into stillness snaps Bum back into the present. He lowers his hands from his ears to wrap around his knees, watches Sangwoo return to his full height with a sigh, chop at a knot in his left shoulder as he mutters to himself, “Like a _beached whale_ , Christ almighty…”

Sangwoo rolls his shoulders and cracks his neck. He swings an arm across his body, tucks his chin over his bicep and pushes in on his elbow to stretch out his deltoid and trapezius muscles. He holds it, long and static, before switching to the other side to do the same. When he drops the stretch and looks down at some middle distance between the bagged, dismembered body and his captive’s curled, quivering one, he reminds Bum of a piece of art from classical antiquity; the Ares Borghese hewn from marble, a god of violence and ruin despised by his father, and revered by all soldiers.

Bum read an account of an ancient war, once. All he can recall from it now is a line from the aggressor’s envoys that went, _‘You know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.’_

Sangwoo catches his eyes and smirks in a way that makes Bum duck his face behind his knees and bite back an apology. He hears Sangwoo’s footsteps, fully expects his captor to tease him for gawking so openly, but instead hears a voice full of unreserved concern ask, “You cold, Bum?”

Sangwoo squats down beside the futon and brushes his fingers over Bum’s toes, ostensibly checking their temperature; Bum curls them in, draws his lower legs closer to the backs of his thighs, barely aborts an uncomfortable titter at the unexpected tickling sensation. He shakes his head no over-quick, and he has to press his face into Sangwoo’s pillow when it makes the room spin like a roulette wheel.

Sangwoo’s hand follows his feet, grabs hold of the right one around its arch and asks attentively, “Your feet are frozen… Do you want a pair of socks?”

“Oh, n-no, Sangwoo, that’s fine, you don’t have to -”

\- but Sangwoo is letting go of his foot, reaching over him to click the electric blanket back on to low and gathering up the soiled, damp bandages at the foot of the bed from last night. He crumples them into a ball and stands back up, smiles down at Bum as if he had said please and thank you instead of politely refusing.

“Alright, I’ll get you some. Is there anything else you’d like?”

Bum works to swallow. His saliva is tacky in the back of his throat, his mouth dry as tinder. “... A glass of water, please?”

Sangwoo tips his head in easygoing acceptance and pads over to the garbage bag nearest the closet. He loosens the drawstring, shoves Bum’s old bandages in with the man’s head and arms, and walks out of the room without tying the bag shut again.

He takes Bum’s ability to breathe with him.    

A pungent stench pours from the bag’s open mouth, creeps along the floor and crawls inside Bum’s nose. Mothballs and moldering cabbage and something so sweet it’s vile, almost like an ultra-concentrated form of nystatin. Bum remembers having a bad case of thrush at six, his grandmother giving him an antifungal lozenge to suck on until it dissolved, how she watched him closely to make sure he didn’t spit the medicine out, unpleasantly sweet as it was; the odor spilling from the open bag is like having his mouth crammed full of those lozenges while bathing in rancid garlic and rotten eggs.

He keens high in his throat and presses his face deeper into Sangwoo’s pillow, pulls up its right side to form a pitiful barricade between him and the corpse decaying across the room. With his eyes closed, he can more clearly make out the man’s slushy sobbing, can hear him ask in terror, “H-Hyunwoo… what’s gotten into you? Did I do something wrong? _I have a wife and_ -”

Bum whimpers, pushes the pillow as tight as he can over his ears, focuses on the electric warmth building up beneath him and the tingling sensation steadily mounting inside his body; the fleeting rapture of Persian poppy coaxing him into feeling good despite his disintegrating grasp on reality.   

The absence of pain is confusing but welcome, and Bum doesn’t question his overwhelming relief when he hears the soft _shuh-kat, shuh-kat_ of Sangwoo’s feet coming back down the hall. He lifts himself up on wobbly arms when Sangwoo steps back into the room, eyes glassy and heavy-lidded. He blushes ballet-slipper pink when Sangwoo’s expression goes from blank to doting as soon as their eyes meet, and he doesn’t notice the foul smell dissipate as the younger man makes his way across the room.  

Sangwoo crouches next to him. He sets a pair of his own crewcut socks and a glass of water down at the top of the futon before gently taking Bum’s arms out from under himself and turning him over to lay out straight on his back. Bum frets with the sheets, immediately wants to return to the fetal position, but Sangwoo shushes him and bends his left leg at the knee to stroke down his calf, under the heel and ball of his foot, back up to the front of his shin.  

“Such pretty legs,” he says, just as fascinated as the first time he made the observation but far more fond. “You could pull off skinny jeans, y’know? Black and high-waisted, with silver buttons and white stitching…”

Bum gets the sinking feeling that Sangwoo isn’t talking about jeans he saw in a catalogue or on a mannequin; that he has a particular pair in mind. Ones he’d seen on a young lady in a lecture hall who bore some resemblance to his mother, and was of a similar size to his captive. Bum can read the writing on the wall, but that doesn’t stop him from smiling nervously at the compliment and nodding his head in thanks.

It doesn’t stop him from feeling special that Sangwoo considers him when choosing his victims.  

Sangwoo returns his smile, seats himself on the floor and gently pulls Bum’s left leg between his own. The new position sprawls Bum diagonally across the futon, spreads his thighs open at a right angle so Sangwoo can see up his skirt, all the way to his soft cock and the shadows his hipbones spill across his skin. Bum flushes brighter, but clutches Sangwoo’s pillow to his chest and makes no move to cover himself as the younger man slips the first sock on, mindful of his bandages and exceedingly tender. Sangwoo reaches for his other leg, but Bum shifts it to join its counterpart before Sangwoo has to do it himself.

His eyes make bones about it when Sangwoo beams at his ready compliance. He buries his face back into the pillow as Sangwoo slips the other sock on and lingers over the cuff, touching his thumb and middle finger together around the widest part of Bum’s atrophied calf muscle.            

“So small...” he murmurs, utterly enchanted by Bum’s dog-hungry proportions. It’s not that Bum eats enough to stay alive so much as he eats too much to die. He can’t remember what it’s like to have an appetite. He never had much of one to start with, so he supposes it isn’t much of a loss.  

“You…” he falters, peeks at Sangwoo over the top of the pillow to ask fawn-shy, “Y-you like it?”

Sangwoo wraps a hand around each of Bum’s doorknob knees, drags him forward and settles a leg on either side of his hips, and he answers him sure as night follows day, “Yes.”  

He slides his hands under Bum’s shoulders to sit him up on the edge of the futon, curls his legs behind Bum’s back and says in his ear, “I like how you fit in my arms, how easy it is to pick you up… You make me feel so strong, Bum.”

Bum shuts his eyes against the acute vertigo that sets the room to swirling as soon as Sangwoo hoists him up, anchors himself around Sangwoo's upper chest to weather the spell. Sangwoo pets his back evenly, hush-hushes him in the lowest tones he can produce, waits for him to regain his sense of balance, and Bum loves him so much in this moment that it scrapes his heart raw and scours his mind of all reason. He brings a shaky, damp hand up to touch Sangwoo’s cheek, looks up at him faint and affectionate.

“You’re always strong, Sangwoo, with or without me. Such a… _strong young man_...”

Sangwoo shudders powerfully beneath his spiderleg fingers and snakeskin whisper, clutches him so hard around the middle Bum wouldn’t be surprised if his ribs snapped apart and speared through his lungs. He whimpers at the intense pressure but hugs Sangwoo right back, as mild as his captor is severe. He pours balm into his voice, runs with the innate impulse to comfort and says, “There, there… there’s a… _hmm_ … there's a sweet boy, isn’t there…?”

Sangwoo _trembles_. He shoves his face into Bum’s neck, where Bum can feel the heat of a blush issuing from his cheeks, where he mumbles out small and childlike, “... _your sweet boy_.”

“M-my…” Bum hesitates, terrified of forgetting his place and speaking above his station, but the bottomless need in Sangwoo’s tightening hands leaves no room for misinterpretation, and he goes on both maternal and desirous, “My sweet boy… my sweet, sweet boy.”

“ _Eomma_ ,” Sangwoo whispers, soft as the skirt Bum wears and hotter than the devil’s kitchen. He radiates a wild red light that only Bum can see, that envelops them both heart and soul and blocks out the world root and branch, and Bum doesn’t hesitate again. He repeats himself with a parent’s fond inflection and familiar phrasing.

“ _Dalkomhan sonyeon… nae dalkomhan sonyeon_ … Sangwoo, Sangwoo is a sweet boy.”

“For you, _eomma_.”  

“Yes, f-for me. He is for me... Sangwoo is my sweet boy… _nae agi, dalkomhan agi_ …” Bum mollycoddles his captor, adopts the lilting accent of a mother smitten with her child, and Sangwoo clings to him faster than the miasma of death marinating the room.   

Sangwoo mumbles something into Bum’s neck that he can’t make out, and Bum hums an indolent request for him to repeat himself, continuing to pet Sangwoo’s bare upper back. Sangwoo leans back just enough Bum can make out how dark his blush is, how his pupils have dilated into pitch-black pits, and the young man swallows before he says again, “... call me… your son.”

Bum’s eyes widen, his hands stuttering across Sangwoo’s skin. Sangwoo is quick to frown, and Bum remembers what a punch to the face feels like; what it’s like to sleep on the basement floor with greasy cockroaches and fetid tin cans for company; that obedience is the only friend he knows. He does as he’s told, bold as the moon come sunup.

“ _N-nae_ … _nae adeul_.”

Sangwoo’s expression one-eighties into a wicked and harrowing joy. He lowers his hands to cup his captive’s bottom, grinds his hips up in a searching circle until his boxer-clad cock rubs past the sheer fabric of Bum’s skirt and directly against the soft flesh of his inner thighs, demands as if he never knew any hesitation, “Your sweet son.”

“Ah - _ahhn, hah..._ _Nae - nae d-dalkomhan adeul_ … Sangwoo, _oh, oh -_ ”

Sangwoo forces Bum down by the hips when he jerks back reflexively, pushes his hardening cock fully into the crux of Bum’s thighs. He holds him still with a quiet, irresistible strength. “Your only son.”    

Bum whines brokenly, pulls down on his skirt useless and unthinking. Sangwoo slaps his hands away and slides his own under the voile cotton, up the outsides of Bum’s thighs, all the way up to his waist; he digs his thumbs down into the hollow cavities under Bum’s iliac crests, spurs him on eager and domineering, “C’mon and say it, Bum. Say it in that pretty voice of yours.”

Bum will bruise later, but there’s no pain in Sangwoo’s hold on him right now. Only pressure and heat, the warm pleasure of being held close and tight. He remembers Sangwoo teasing him for needing reassurance, and he doesn’t miss the irony of his captor’s weakness for verbal affirmations of devotion. Another timid smile plays at his chapped lips as he says, “ _Nae yuilhan adeul_.”

Sangwoo shivers again, coils his heels in tighter against the small of Bum’s back, rocks his hips up as he shoves Bum’s down. The motion slides their cocks together, Sangwoo’s boxers an insubstantial separation between the two of them; Bum chokes out a noise like he’s been clotheslined at the sudden friction. He clutches Sangwoo’s shoulders against the dizzy tide threatening to swallow him whole, and Sangwoo groans out, “That’s right… _that’s right, eomma._ ”

He slows down his rock-and-sway into waltz time - _one_ two three, _one_ two three, _one_ two three - and the amount of effort it takes him does nothing to help Bum’s impaired equilibrium.

“S-Sangwoo - _hah, hnn_ -”

“Again, again. I’m your only - I’m your one and only. Say it again.”

Sangwoo shouldn’t call to mind a boy begging his mother to push him higher on a swing set. He shouldn’t make Bum think of aching vulnerability, or deep-seated insecurity, or the crushing fear of abandonment. He shouldn’t inspire empathy in anyone.  

“ _Nae yuilhan_ … _nae yuilhan_ _adeul_ , Sangwoo.”

Sangwoo looks at him like he’s missed him for ages. He removes his hands from Bum’s skirt to lift the older man’s left hand back to his warm cheek, to tug the other one down to lay over his pounding heart. He smiles sinless as any child, closes his eyes and says, “ _I love you._ ”

It’s not fair, how those three little words make Bum sick with rapture. How they sever his tenuous grip on his sense of self, nevermind that they’re not even for him. He doesn’t dare to hope that they ever will be, but that doesn’t stop them from sounding more beautiful than anything this world has ever graced him with before.

“... I love you, too,” he whispers, maintaining his motherly cadence and tone. The last time Sangwoo had said _I love you_ , crouched before him in the hallway by the stairs, staring straight through him with heavy, distant eyes, Bum had stuttered out his reply with frantic honesty and deep formality; the voice of a helpless victim instead of a caring mother. Sangwoo came back to himself, the spell broken, corrected his misunderstanding with scathing condescension, _‘Haha… what? Was I talking to you? I meant my mom. My mom. Are you my mother?’_

This time, however, Sangwoo opens his eyes and presses his cheek tighter against Bum’s palm, rolls his hips steady and sturdy up into his captive’s pelvis as he looks down on him in breathless, eager delight.  

“She told me there was someone out there for me,” he confesses fervently. “Someone who would love me no matter what, who would never leave me alone again. I brought girls home, but she always disapproved of them… _not good enough, not good enough for you_. I got rid of them. I got so frustrated. I began to doubt her, began to wonder if anyone would ever be good enough. I tried to shut her out, but she only got mad and started to beat on the door every night.”

Sangwoo doesn’t stop grinding their hips together as he speaks. He lets go of Bum’s hands to wrap back around his narrow waist, to manhandle his body into rubbing their cocks against one another in earnest.

“S-Sangwoo! Oh! Ah, ah, _unnh, mmn_ -”  

“She kept me up for _weeks_. I was so tired I was sure it was gonna kill me, but just when I thought I couldn’t take it anymore… she stopped.”

He pins Bum down and shoves his hips up firmly, holds them still for the longest minute Bum has ever had the pleasure to suffer through. He stares at Bum’s face with unnerving intensity, and the lucid mania staining his eyes sable freezes the air in Bum’s lungs, frosts his blood too cold to flow.

“She stopped, and it got better, but I couldn’t figure out why. I was worried that she’d given up on me… that she didn’t care anymore if I stayed alone forever, but then…” he leans forward to peck Bum on the cheek, mystifyingly chaste in stark contrast to his stiff erection and stifled thrusting, whispers conspiratorially into the scarce space between them, “... this old fucking dope of a cop stopped me in the street, and d’you know what he told me, Bum?”

Bum bites into his lower lip and shakes his head no, though he has a good idea, and Sangwoo fires him a thousand-watt grin that shoots chills down his spine.

“That _my cousin_ was waiting for me _at my house!_ … Can you imagine my surprise?”

Bum flushes in speechless embarrassment. This is the first time Sangwoo’s told him exactly how he found out Bum had broken into his home, in time to catch him in the basement, kneeling over the girl in the manila rope and pricey panties. Though Bum had been able to guess as much from Sangwoo’s first words to him -

_‘I don’t know who are, but I haven’t seen my relatives in ten years. You might as well have said you were my brother.’_

\- it’s still not easy to hear Sangwoo recount the events that led up to their cohabitation. He glances past Sangwoo’s shoulder, to the blue garbage bags lined up against the far wall, to the man that had once been a husband and a father but is now nothing more than sulfurous effluvia and sundered meat. He thinks of the funeral the man will never have, the answers his widow and child will never get, and no amount of narcotics will ever numb him enough to deal with this.

“When I first saw you, I didn’t understand. I thought - I don’t know, maybe that you had shown up to help that stupid bitch, to try and get me in trouble or something -” Sangwoo grabs Bum’s face, pinches the older man’s cheeks together until his mouth puckers, until his eyes refocus on him, “- but then you told me you fell in love with me - before you even introduced yourself! - and I knew - I _knew_ you were the one that she meant all along, Bum.”

Sangwoo lightens his grip, strokes his fingertips soft and mild over the delicate curve of Bum’s jaw. “No wonder I couldn’t find you, no matter how much I looked… you had to come to me before we could be together.”

Sangwoo’s aura is a suffocating scarlet-red, an eerie manifestation of insanity that raises the hair on the back of Bum’s neck, that breaks his skin out into goosebumps. Bum’s throat is dryer than cardboard. His heart is attempting to race, but it keeps on tripping up and crashing into his queasy stomach. The dead-channel static shrouding his vision, which never did anything more than fade into a dull quiver, now amplifies into a vivid, pulsing snowfall.

“ _Ugh… ow..._ ” Bum hears agonized groaning from the open garbage bag, and he whines uncontrollably.

“S-Sangwoo… _Sangwoo_ -”

“Shh, shh, hush, Bum, hush,” Sangwoo pets through his hair, smiles at him so sweet and so warm as he says, “Such a shy little thing… you made me wait for years while you worked up the courage to let me meet you. I’m so relieved you finally did.”              

Sangwoo eases him back half a foot, keeps a hand on his waist as he reaches over with the other to pick up the glass of water beside the head of the futon. He raises the rim to settle against Bum’s lips and gently says, “Drink.”

As soon as the first drop of cool water hits Bum’s mouth, his eyes slide closed and he tilts his head back, no need to be told twice. Sangwoo tips the glass up slowly, watches Bum’s throat work as he gratefully gulps down mouthful after mouthful, and Bum feels his captor’s cock twitch between his thighs. Bum blushes brighter, but the pressing urge to quell his thirst overrides his awkwardness, and he only reaches his hands out to brace himself against Sangwoo’s chest as he focuses on not spilling any water.

When the glass is nearly empty, Sangwoo pulls it away, laughs lightly when Bum tries to follow it and he has to stay him with a tap on his hip. Bum looks up at him in vague confusion, waxing sunlight glinting off his wet mouth as he tilts his head. Sangwoo smirks mischievously, lifts up his free hand to thumb at Bum’s lower lip; he stares at him with eyes wide open as he pours the last of the water down the front of Bum’s shirt.

“Look at that…” he says, cheery expression belying his chiding tone, “... you got it all over the shirt I gave you, Bum. We’ll have to take this off and dry it, now.”

Sangwoo tosses the glass on the hardwood floor with a careless flick of his wrist; it wobbles and tips over on its side, _shurrs_ across the room until it comes to rest against the leftmost garbage bag. Bum watches the glass still below the blue plastic, stares on through blurry, flickering lace as the bag begins to tilt forward, to spill its contents upon the floor; rusty, crinkled bandages and an olive arm without a hand, covered in - lobster shells and raspberry jam, _Jihae’s red nail polish_ , he remembers clutching the bottle in his hand just to feel close to her, remembers that it’s sitting right on his desk at _home_ \-   

Sangwoo breaks his line of sight by pulling the Henley over his head. He throws it aside, and as soon as the shirt hits the ground, Bum snaps his eyes back to the garbage bag - only to see that it’s once again standing upright. The empty glass is sitting between them and the back wall, set back down right where Sangwoo had it to start with. Bum’s mouth drops open, eyes straining wide and arms wrapping around himself instinctively; as if through a thick woolen quilt, he feels the vibration of Sangwoo chuckling, and he looks back to his captor in inchoate fear.       

“Don’t be scared, Bum. You’ll like this, I promise… I’ll make sure it feels good for you, too.”

Sangwoo grabs up his wrists and pulls his arms back open, pushes him back and lays him on his left side over the futon. He tucks his pillow between Bum’s neck and shoulder, as if he’s worried about Bum getting a cramp, and the show of consideration deadens the roaring in Bum’s ears like nothing else ever could.

“That’s right, just be still for me for a minute…” Sangwoo says, half-focused on reaching for the laminated tube at the foot of the futon. He picks it up and pops it open _,_ crawls in behind Bum and stretches out on his left side, as well. As Sangwoo bunches up his skirt just below the cleft of his ass, Bum stares out across the scant fifteen feet between them and the murdered elephant in the room. Sangwoo squeezes the tube’s contents, a clear water-soluble jelly, across the palm of his hand, and lifts Bum’s right leg to coat it liberally over the pliant flesh of his inner thighs.

“S’cold,” Bum mumbles without any real complaint, and Sangwoo shushes him again. He presses the whole of his hand against Bum’s skin, days of exploratory touches long bygone and replaced with assertions of ownership.

“It’ll warm up soon. Be patient.”

It does warm up. Sangwoo fondles and kneads his thighs well beyond any argument for necessity; every touch feels self-indulgent, but for which one of them, Bum can’t tell. He tries to relax into Sangwoo’s thoughtful and slow preparation, but he can’t take his eyes off of the bags, their every hideous bulge and oblique angle, and can only manage a superficial calm.

“That’s it… that’s more like it…” Sangwoo praises his acting readily, slips his boxers down just enough to free his cock over the waistband. He cinches in tight against the line of Bum’s back, fits his cock between Bum's slick upper thighs, and presses Bum’s knees together as tight as the bones will allow.

“Uuu- _ahn, ahhn!_ ”     

“Relax, _relax already_. This won’t work if you keep trying to curl up… keep your knees locked, okay? Work with me here... yeah, yeah, like that. Keep them like that, Bum,” Sangwoo says into his hair, demanding tone softened by his flighty hands. They can’t sit still, sliding up Bum’s side and under his shoulder, slinking across his ribs and stealing over his chest. He thrusts his hips, short and sighing against the back of Bum’s neck, and Bum fists his hand in Sangwoo’s pillow to fight back an overwhelmed sob.

He has an erection. It’s hidden beneath the pile of fabric over his groin, an afterthought compared to Sangwoo’s between his legs, but it is undeniably _there_ and its proximity to a dismembered corpse is _troubling_.

“Good, good, yeah, that’s - tighten up like that again, just like - _fuck, Bum_ -”    

Sangwoo gives up on talking and presses his forehead between Bum’s shoulder blades, stretches his thrusts out ocean-tide long, grips Bum back to his chest hard as hail stones. Bum abbreviates his cries into breathy moans, lays a hand over Sangwoo’s centered on his sternum and closes his eyes, but then he can hear from the other side of the room -

“G-get rid…? You want me to kill him…? _No way!_ There’s no way I -”

Bum strains his eyes open wide, looks back at the garbage bags to see - the glass once again on its side, resting against the bag on the left; the bag slumping in at the middle, toppling over and slopping out two arms; one handless and bent grotesquely at the elbow, the other clutching his used bandages in twitching, purple fingers.

The man’s head rolls out between his arms, blood-soaked and blindfolded. It comes to a halt atop its severed neck with an oozy _splush_ , fat tears slithering down its pallid cheeks as it opens its mouth and says, “There’s no way I could… _kill a person_ … There’s no way I could commit a crime! I have a _wife and daughter waiting for me at home_ , _please_ -”         

Bum chokes on the knot in his throat, too petrified to even shut his eyes against the image before him. Sangwoo is holding back groans against his chilled spine, gunpowder heat and firework nearness, rocking against him close as one second is to the next, and Bum’s head can’t keep up with what his eyes insist they are witnessing - the handless arm flopping on the hardwood floor like a toadfish out of water, the other grappling with the gauze Bum had worn last night, furiously wrenching its chubby fingers up in the cotton bandages, trying to tear them to pieces.

“H-help me…” the head says, gurgling and sightless. “I… I can’t do it by myself… _help me_ …”

Panting fills the room. Sangwoo’s, deep and heavy; Bum’s, shallow and panicked; the head’s, wretched and desperate.

“I… can’t… I’m sorry, I - I can’t… kill a person… _help me, help me, help me!_ ” it says, its lips working slow and repulsive around each word. Bum stares on in a terror more complete than any he has ever experienced, gripped by fright so unearthly it reaches transcendence.

“Sangwoo…” he whispers, sure of nothing but the fact that he needs to call his captor’s name. It’s the only sound that makes any sense, and he repeats it again and again, until it’s divorced from meaning and sounds alien to his own ears. “Sangwoo… Sangwoo… _Sangwoo_ …”  

If he times himself correctly, he can block out the hideous _lub-dub, lub-dub_ of the dead man’s heart sounding from the center-right trash bag.

Sangwoo reaches a hand down to rest over Bum’s skirt, half and inch above his hard cock, and Bum bites his tongue in the middle of calling Sangwoo’s name. His sides and thighs tense up hard, and Sangwoo gives a guttural grunt on an instroke. Bum can feel teeth against his shoulder, and when he glances down he can see Sangwoo’s cockhead come into view from between the supple valley of his sartorius muscles; his own cock throbs with needy blood at the sight, and he thinks from a remote corner of distraught sanity, _‘What is wrong with me?’_

“Help me… please… help me, _please_ …” the head chants on. The sunlight catches and glints over its thin, glossy hair and bloated, jibbering cheeks. As it speaks, it wobbles in an elongated oval pattern, like a hardboiled egg balanced on its bottom and spun atop a kitchen counter, and just like a spun egg, the head rocks itself into falling on its side. Its blindfold falls halfway off, so Bum can see one of its sunken, fearful eyes, and he’s confused for the span of three trusts from Sangwoo before he realizes why all his organs are struggling to hide behind one another, why his soul is trying to take refuge in the rafters, well above reality - because his own eye is staring back at him.

The head has his eyes.

He twists his torso quicker than Sangwoo can react, the strength of his panic outdoing Sangwoo’s distracted hold on him; he flips around entirely, breaking Sangwoo’s slide back into the split of his thighs, tucking his hands under his neck and struggling to get a handle on his hyperventilation. Sangwoo simply hikes him up about his armpits to just above shoulder level, pushes his leaking cock back through the fronts of Bum’s thighs as if he never missed a thrust, twines their ankles together as he gathers Bum up in his arms and asks hot against his ear, “What’s wrong? … You don’t want me to touch it, Bum?”

Bum isn’t sure what he means, until he slips a hand between their bodies to press against the top of his erection in unprompted explanation. Bum’s stampeding breath stutters into a heavy gasp, and Sangwoo smirks above him.

“No… of course you do. You’d crawl over dirty needles just to suck my dick, wouldn’t you?”

Bum’s heart calls it quits on carrying him through the very thought, and Sangwoo rolls his eyes with an amused huff. “I’m not gonna make you, you fucking twit; calm down. Like I’m gonna go hit up heroin junkies for their tar sticks and get you infected with HIV or some shit… bit excessive, don’t you think? I just meant that I know how much you want me to do this…”

He fits his hand around Bum’s cock through the tent it’s pitching in the thin fabric, gives an experimental stroke to the tip and back down. Bum makes a sound like a spooked horse, a sort of pursy whimper and palsy jerk, and that’s all the encouragement Sangwoo needs to stroke him again and again and again, quick and dry and deeply keen.     

“Sangwoo, you don’t… y-you don’t have to do - _ah,_ _uhnn_ -”

“I want to,” Sangwoo says lowly; he squeezes tight around the base, drags on up to the tip hard enough to chafe. “I want to touch you. Don’t you want me to touch you?”

“Y- _yes_ , Sangwoo, of course I do. You know I do… just - just like you said.”

Sangwoo tilts his head, sweetens his grip into something soft and subtle, heaven on Bum’s reddening skin, and asks, “Then what’re you fussing about?”

“I’m…” Bum bends his fingers over Sangwoo’s shoulders, breathes out portions of his muggy fright between their overheated bodies. “I’m _scared_ , Sangwoo… ‘m so scared.”

Sangwoo presses Bum’s thighs tighter closed, forces their lower bodies close as flesh allows. Bum clings fast to his neck and cries out, frail and asthmatic, and Sangwoo grabs up his chin to stare holes through his expression as he traces featherlight, four-way patterns over his upsettingly erect cock.   

“... of me?”

Sangwoo doesn’t sound big when he asks. He doesn’t sound amused or arrogant or aggressive or cruel. He sounds like the young man who told Bum that they were both orphans and that being loved made him feel strong; who asked him if he liked sweet snacks and rested his head on his lap, a sensitive kid still all wrapped up in his mother’s apron strings, still blameless and openhearted and whole.

Bum opens his eyes, looks at Sangwoo with trembling directness as he says, “N-no… no, not - not of you… never… never of such a sweet boy.”

Sangwoo blushes, sudden and bright. He bites his lip as he slides his cock out slow and pushes it back between Bum’s legs at a higher angle, brushes its tip against the fabric covering the cleft of Bum’s ass; he rubs the heel of his hand against Bum’s cock in time with his thrust, smiles widely when Bum gasps and shudders in his arms.

“Your sweet boy,” he says again, far more shy than a murderer or a man with a dick so big should be allowed to bring off, and Bum goes magenta to match his captor’s crimson.

“Yes, m-my sweet boy… I’m not scared of my sweet boy, no, not of him… _nae dalkomhan sonyeon aniya_ …”

Sangwoo’s smile spotlights up into a shameless grin, and he presses their mouths together with a shivering, seismic energy. He kisses unrestrained, swiping the whole of his broad tongue against every nook and cranny of Bum's mouth, licking under and around and in like he can't get enough of the taste. When he pulls away, he brings his hand up from between Bum’s legs to brush the backs of his knuckles against Bum’s cheek, dips his grin down into an inquisitive frown.

“Then what’s scaring you, Bum?”

A drop of sweat strikes down Bum’s temple. He swallows around the building saliva in his mouth, trains his eyes on Sangwoo’s hooked fingers as he whispers, “H-him, Sangwoo.”

“Him?” Sangwoo glances at the bedroom’s open door and out into the hallway, scans the corners of the ceiling for the space of two breaths before he finally settles on the garbage bags across the room.

“Oh… _him_.”

Contempt flattens Sangwoo’s affect, colors him quicksilver cold and quietly callous, and Bum is squirming to curl inwards before he even registers the urge to make himself smaller. It’s when Sangwoo lets out a surprised _oomph_ and Bum feels the younger man’s cock twitch against his thighs that he catches himself and goes still; he locks eyes with his captor to gauge if any grovelling is in order, but Sangwoo only slips his hand down between them to get back to palming Bum’s cock through the fabric, about-faces to animated and attentive.

“ _Uhn, mmhm,_ Sangwoo -”

“Are you hearing him, Bum? Is he trying to talk to you?” Sangwoo shifts his hips and slides his free hand under and around the back of Bum’s neck, pitches his voice lower to ask, “... What did I tell you last night?”  

“To - to let you know,” Bum bucks, contracted and involuntary, against Sangwoo’s chest; Sangwoo gives both his neck and cock a goading squeeze and he says in a rush, “To let you know next time it happened!”

Sangwoo pumps his cock, swiping the flimsy cotton up and down his shaft in a manner that is both achingly good and not good enough, threads fingers up through his hair and pulls his head back with a dispersed grip that pinches like a parallel clamp. “Did it happen again, Bum?”

“... Y-yes, Sangwoo, b-but I -”

“- ignored me.”   

“No! No, I-I just -”

“- didn’t wanna bother me, yeah, I got that last night, because I actually _listen to you_.”

Bum tightens his hold on Sangwoo’s shoulders, sobs up a storm in lieu of apology, and Sangwoo adds sugar to his tone as he goes on with jarring sweetness, “... and you’ve gotta listen to _me_ if this is gonna work out, Bum. I told you this was something I needed to know for a reason. Do you think I talk for my health?”

Bum shakes his head in answer, but Sangwoo twists up the hand in his hair until he says out loud, “No, Sangwoo!”

“That’s exactly right, Bum,” Sangwoo grazes his fingertips behind Bum’s ears, along his hairline, up across his aching scalp. “I know you have trouble expressing yourself. I’m trying to make it easier for you to come to me… I’m trying _so hard_ for you, and I’m getting so little in return. How do you think that makes me feel?”  

Sangwoo caresses his cock just as soft as Bum cries hard, strikes a balancing act between seeking both Bum’s comfort and his unquestioning compliance. When he speaks, it’s with the voice of a man determined to reach common ground by any means necessary.

“I want us to stay together. I want this to work out for us, but I can’t make it happen all on my own… I can’t be the only one who wants it, Bum. I need you to listen to me when I tell you what to do, or else…” he slips his hand down from the top of Bum’s head to ghost over the bloody bandages around his neck, and he doesn’t have to elaborate on what he means by _or else_. Bum quiets down quicker than fire burns, and Sangwoo starts tucking strands of his hair behind his ear, only for them to fall right back out of place so he can do it again, a sisyphean task he takes on with simple pleasure.        

“I wanna move past that. I know you do, too, but you have to put in some effort… at least meet me halfway, Bum. Why don’t you start by telling me why you’re scared of the recycling?”

Sangwoo has a way of phrasing his demands as questions. _Why don’t you_ and _would you please_ and _how about we_ are all costumes he likes to dress his orders up in, silken camouflage for steel commands. Bum hears the implied _if you know what’s good for you_ , and he wraps his arms around Sangwoo’s neck, looks up at him through the wet clumps of his eyelashes as he says, “Okay… okay, Sangwoo. I can… I can do that.” 

Sangwoo smiles at him, doesn't stop playing with his bangs or gently stroking his cock as he waits for him to describe the hell inside his head, and Bum knows he's lost.

There is peace in surrender, and so surrender is where he goes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ... I blame Sangwoo and his mommy issues for dragging this chapter out so long I had to break it in half. I didn't realize he had so much shit to talk about; if he had just let me know, I never would have assumed I could fit everything into one last chapter.
> 
> I'm sorry this didn't wrap things up like I said it would, but I hope you enjoyed it all the same! Please, feel free to let me know what you thought of this part - feedback of all sorts is always deeply appreciated :)
> 
> Thank you so much for reading this far!


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